The parlors are thronged almost to suffocation; the air is warm, and laden with a hundred odors, which combine to make it well-nigh unbreathable; the constant babble of conversation goes on with the steady click-clack of a mill-wheel, and several hundred people persistently talk without saying anything whatever.

Mrs. Chumley Jones is there, in a most effective, costume of garnet plush, adorned with some sort of long-haired black fur. She is conscious of being perfectly well dressed, of being the best-known woman in the parlors, and most of all is she now, as always, conscious of being the one and only Mrs. Chumley Jones. Soothed and sustained by an unfaltering trust in all these good things, she moves slowly through the rooms, or stands at some convenient coign of vantage, dropping a word to[134] this one and to that, with just the right differences of manner fitted to the degrees of the people whom she addresses.

[134]

“My dear Mrs. Fruffles,” she remarks to the hostess, “you do always have such enchanting receptions!”

“Oh, thank you, dear Mrs. Jones,” responds the other, fully aware what is expected of her; “I wish I could begin to have anything so charming as your Fridays.”

“Oh, so kind of you to say so,” murmurs Mrs. Jones, with the expressive shake of the head proper to the sentiment and the occasion.

Then she passes on to her duty elsewhere.

“How do you do, Mrs. Jones?” the voice of Ferdinand Maunder says at her side. “Isn’t it a lovely day? It is really like a Roman winter; don’t you think so?”

“Yes, it really is, Mr. Maunder.”

“Yes, that’s what I’ve been saying to myself all day.”

“It is so much nicer of you to say it to me.”

“Oh, Mrs. Jones, you are always so clever at turning things.”

They smile at each other with perfect and well-bred inanity for a second, and then Fred Lasceet slips in between them.

“How do you do, Mrs. Jones?”

“Oh, how do you do, Mr. Lasceet? It is ever so long since I have seen you.”

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