largely owing to his supervision.

Many persons have heard much, though most have doubtless seen
little, of the famous institution of the salon, and many are born
to the depression of knowing that this finest flower of social life
refuses to bloom where the English tongue is spoken. The
explanation is usually that our women have not the skill to
cultivate it--the art to direct through a smiling land, between
suggestive shores, a sinuous stream of talk. My affectionate, my
pious memory of Mr. Offord contradicts this induction only, I fear,
more insidiously to confirm it. The sallow and slightly smoked
drawing-room in which he spent so large a portion of the last years
of his life certainly deserved the distinguished name; but on the
other hand it couldn't be said at all to owe its stamp to any
intervention throwing into relief the fact that there was no Mrs.
Offord. The dear man had indeed, at the most, been capable of one
of those sacrifices to which women are deemed peculiarly apt: he
had recognised--under the influence, in some degree, it is true, of
physical infirmity--that if you wish people to find you at home you
must manage not to be out. He had in short accepted the truth
which many dabblers in the social art are slow to learn, that you
must really, as they say, take a line, and that the only way as yet
discovered of being at home is to stay at home. Finally his own
fireside had become a summary of his habits. Why should he ever
have left it?--since this would have been leaving what was
notoriously pleasantest in London, the compact charmed cluster
(thinning away indeed into casual couples) round the fine old last-
century chimney-piece which, with the exception of the remarkable
collection of miniatures, was the best thing the place contained.
Mr. Offord wasn't rich; he had nothing but his pension and the use