really "clever people" did not belong to her set. The discovery which
all who love adulation quickly make--namely, that the truly appreciative
and sympathetic and gifted are for the greater part to be found in a
class below their own--was duly made and registered by Sybell. She
avowed that class differences were nothing to her with the enthusiasm of
all those who since the world began have preferred to be first in the
society which they gather round them.

Fortunately for Sybell she was not troubled by doubts respecting the
clearness of her own judgment. Eccentricity was in her eyes originality;
a wholesale contradiction of established facts was a new view. She had
not the horrid perception of difference between the real and the
imitation which spoils the lives of many. She was equally delighted with
both, and remained in blissful ignorance of the fact that her "deep"
conversation was felt to be exhaustingly superficial if by chance she
came across the real artist or thinker instead of his counterfeit.

Consequently to her house came the _raté_ in all his most virulent
developments; the "new woman" with stupendous lopsided opinions on
difficult Old Testament subjects; the "lady authoress" with a mission to
show up the vices of a society which she knew only by hearsay. Hither
came, unwittingly, simple-minded Church dignitaries, who, Sybell hoped,
might influence for his good the young agnostic poet who had written a
sonnet on her muff-chain, a very daring sonnet, which Doll, who did not
care for poetry, had not been shown. Hither, by mistake, thinking it was
an ordinary dinner-party, came Hugh, whom Sybell said she had
discovered, and who was not aware that he was in need of discovery. And
hither also on this particular evening came Rachel West, whom Sybell had
pronounced to be very intelligent a few days before, and who was
serenely unconscious that she was present on her probation, and that if