Then he watched her in what seemed something of a triumphal progress
through the crowded hall. He saw the looks of the girl students from the
newly-organised women's colleges--as she passed--a little askance and
chill; he watched a Scotch metaphysical professor, with a fiery face set
in a mass of flaming hair and beard, which had won him the nickname from
his philosophical pupils of "the devil in a mist," forcing an
introduction to her; he saw the Vice-Chancellor graciously unbending,
and man after man come up among the younger dons to ask Sorell to
present them. She received it all with a smiling and nonchalant grace,
perfectly at her ease, it seemed, and ready to say the right thing to
young and old. "It's the training they get--the young women of her
sort--that does it," thought the Master. "They are in society from their
babyhood. Our poor, battered aristocracy--the Radicals have kicked away
all its natural supports, and left it _dans l'air_; but it can still
teach manners and the art to please. The undergraduates, however, seem
shy of her."

For although among the groups of men, who stood huddled together mostly
at the back of the room, many eyes were turned upon the newcomer, no one
among them approached her. She held her court among the seniors, as no
doubt, thought the Master, she had been accustomed to do from the days
of her short frocks. He envisaged the apartment in the Palazzo Barberini
whereof the fame had often reached Oxford, for the Risboroughs held open
house there for the English scholar and professor on his travels. He
himself had not been in Rome for fifteen years, and had never made the
Risboroughs' acquaintance in Italy. But the kind of society which
gathers round the English peer of old family who takes an apartment in
Rome or Florence for the winter was quite familiar to him--the
travelling English men and women of the same class, diplomats of all