"Here you are!" said Etches, with an inattentive, plutocratic gesture
handing over a five-pound note. He was one of those men who never
venture out of sight of a bank without a banknote in their pockets--
"Because you never know what may turn up."

Denry accepted the note with a silent nod. In some directions he was
gifted with astounding insight, and he could read in the faces of the
haughty males surrounding him that in the space of a few minutes he had
risen from nonentity into renown. He had become a great man. He did not
at once realise how great, how renowned. But he saw enough in those eyes
to cause his heart to glow, and to rouse in his brain those ambitious
dreams which stirred him upon occasion. He left the group; he had need
of motion, and also of that mental privacy which one may enjoy while
strolling about on a crowded floor in the midst of a considerable noise.
He noticed that the Countess was now dancing with an alderman, and that
the alderman, by an oversight inexcusable in an alderman, was not
wearing gloves. It was he, Denry, who had broken the ice, so that the
alderman might plunge into the water. He first had danced with the
Countess, and had rendered her up to the alderman with delicious gaiety
upon her countenance. By instinct he knew Bursley, and he knew that he
would be talked of. He knew that, for a time at any rate, he would
displace even Jos Curtenty, that almost professional "card" and amuser
of burgesses, in the popular imagination. It would not be: "Have ye
heard Jos's latest?" It would be: "Have ye heard about young Machin,
Duncalf's clerk?"

Then he met Ruth Earp, strolling in the opposite direction with a young
girl, one of her pupils, of whom all he knew was that her name was
Nellie, and that this was her first ball: a childish little thing with a