graceful and youthful Egeria, who is one of London's most powerful
social influences. "It will be interesting to see what becomes of
them."

Lady Everington has been criticised for stony-heartedness, for
opportunism, and for selfish abuse of her husband's vast wealth. She
has been likened to an experimental chemist, who mixes discordant
elements together in order to watch the results, chilling them in ice
or heating them over the fire, until the lives burst in fragments or
the colour slowly fades out of them. She has been called an artist in
_mésalliances_, a mismatch-maker of dangerous cunning, a dangler of
picturesque beggar-maids before romantic-eyed Cophetuas, a daring
promoter of ambitious American girls and a champion of musical comedy
peeresses. Her house has been named the Junior Bachelors Club. The
charming young men who seem to be bound to its hospitable board by
invisible chains are the material for her dashing improvisations and
the _dramatis personae_ of the scores of little domestic comedies
which she likes to keep floating around her in different stages of
development.

Geoffrey Barrington had been the secretary of this club, and a
favourite with the divinity who presided over it. We had all supposed
that he would remain a bachelor; and the advent of Asako Fujinami into
London society gave us at first no reason to change our opinion. But
she was certainly attractive.

* * * * *

She ought to have been married in a kimono. There was no doubt about
it now, when there was more liberty to inspect her, as she stood there