spectators I thought I noted an increasing number of my countrymen and
women, so in the passing vehicles I fancied more and more of them in the
hired turnouts which cannot long keep their secret from the critical
eye. These were as obvious to conjecture as some other turnouts, which I
fancied of a decayed ancestrality: cumbrous landaus and victorias, with
rubberless tires, which grumbled and grieved in their course for the
_passati tempi_, and expressed a rheumatic scorn for the parvenu
carriages, and for all the types of motors which more and more invade
the drives of the Park. They had a literary quality, and were out of
Thackeray and Trollope, in the dearth of any modern society novelists
great enough for them to be out of.

If such novelists had not been wanting I am sure I should not be left
with the problem of an extremely pretty and charming woman whose scarf
one morning so much engaged the eye of the gentleman sitting beside
another extremely pretty and charming woman, that he left her and came
and sat down by the new-comer, who let him play with the fringe of her
scarf. Was she in a manner playing _him_ with it? A thoroughly
equipped society fiction, such as the English now lack, would have
instructed me, and taught me the mystic meaning of the young girls who
fluttered up and down the paths by twos and threes, exquisite
complexions, exquisite shapes, exquisite profiles, exquisite costumes,
in a glad momentary freedom from chaperonage. It would fix even the
exact social value of that companion of a lady stopped in chat by that
other lady, who was always hopping up and stopping people of her
acquaintance. The companion was not of her acquaintance, nor was she now
made of it; she stood statue-still and sphinx-patient in the walk, and
only an eye ever avid of story could be aware of the impassioned tapping
of the little foot whose mute drama faintly agitated the hem of her
drapery. Was she poor and proud, or was she rich and scornful in her