society or to conversation, for to their house at Hampstead many people
came, uttering many words, but both the people and the words were so
very different. After the first blush, the first reconnaissance of the
two Bigwigs between whom she sat, her eyes WOULD stray and her ears
would only half listen to them. Indeed, half her ears, she soon found
out, were quite enough to deal with Colonel Martlett and Sir John
Fanfar. Across the azaleas she let her glance come now and again to
anchor on her father's face, and exchanged with him a most enjoyable
blink. She tried once or twice to get through to Alan, but he was always
eating; he looked very like a young Uncle Stanley this evening.

What was she feeling? Short, quick stabs of self-consciousness as to how
she was looking; a sort of stunned excitement due to sheer noise and the
number of things offered to her to eat and drink; keen pleasure in the
consciousness that Colonel Martlett and Sir John Fanfar and other men,
especially that nice one with the straggly moustache who looked as if he
were going to bite, glanced at her when they saw she wasn't looking. If
only she had been quite certain that it was not because they thought her
too young to be there! She felt a sort of continual exhilaration, that
this was the great world--the world where important things were said and
done, together with an intense listening expectancy, and a sense most
unexpected and almost frightening, that nothing important was being said
or would be done. But this she knew to be impudent. On Sunday evenings
at home people talked about a future existence, about Nietzsche,
Tolstoy, Chinese pictures, post-impressionism, and would suddenly grow
hot and furious about peace, and Strauss, justice, marriage, and
De Maupassant, and whether people were losing their souls through
materialism, and sometimes one of them would get up and walk about the
room. But to-night the only words she could catch were the names of two
politicians whom nobody seemed to approve of, except that nice one who