Page 103 (1/1)

At Mrs Montrayner's dinner parties a world of silentwomen The hostess has a taste for busy celebrities who eat their dinner without thought of the cookery, and regard their fair neighbours much as the diners think of the band in a restaurant She chose her company with care, and if at her table there was not the busy clack of a fluent conversation, there was always the possibility of bons mots and the off-chance of a State secret So to have dined with the Montrayners became a boast in a small social set, and to the unilluminate the Montrayner banquets sees

Wratislaw found hi listlessly at the faces beyond He was extrerey face and sunken eyes showed the labour he had been passing through The country was approaching the throes of a crisis, and as yet the future was a blind alley to hiered all the afternoon in the Commons; his even temper had been perilously near its limits, and he had been betrayed unconsciously into certain ineptitudes which he kneould grin in his face on thearticles The Continent seee of an outbreak; in the East especially, Russia by a score of petty acts had seemed to foreshadow an inco for the spark; and he felt disht colobe He ran over in his uely safe; and yet he was conscious that all was vaguely unsettled The world was on the eve of one of its cyclic changes, and unrest seemed to make the air murky

He tried to be polite and listened attentively to the lady on his right, as telling hie But his air was so manifestly artificial that she turned to the presus

"You look ill," she said--she was one who adopted theyou in the House?"

"Pretty fair," and he sht hours' sleep in the last four days, and I don't think Beauregard could say as o to a quiet place and sleep for a week Brittany would do--or Scotland"