bibelot or a new "model" that one's best friend wanted, or of
being invited to some private show, or some exclusive
entertainment, that one's best friend couldn't get to. There
was nothing, now, that she couldn't buy, nowhere that she
couldn't go: she had only to choose and to triumph. And for a
while the surface-excitement of her life gave her the illusion
of enjoyment.

Strefford, as she had expected, had postponed his return to
England, and they had now been for nearly three weeks together
in their new, and virtually avowed, relation. She had fancied
that, after all, the easiest part of it would be just the being
with Strefford--the falling back on their old tried friendship
to efface the sense of strangeness. But, though she had so soon
grown used to his caresses, he himself remained curiously
unfamiliar: she was hardly sure, at times, that it was the old
Strefford she was talking to. It was not that his point of view
had changed, but that new things occupied and absorbed him. In
all the small sides of his great situation he took an almost
childish satisfaction; and though he still laughed at both its
privileges and its obligations, it was now with a jealous
laughter.

It amused him inexhaustibly, for instance, to be made up to by
all the people who had always disapproved of him, and to unite
at the same table persons who had to dissemble their annoyance
at being invited together lest they should not be invited at
all. Equally exhilarating was the capricious favouring of the
dull and dowdy on occasions when the brilliant and disreputable
expected his notice. It enchanted him, for example, to ask the