Everyone, man or woman, who is endowed at birth with a sensitive nature is subject to occasional inrushes of detachment that without warning cut him off from realities for moments or hours, converting everyday matters into the consistency of dream-life.  It was through this medium that Coryndon saw Mrs. Wilder when he came into the large upstairs drawing-room.  It would have annoyed her to know that she appeared indefinite and shadowy to his mind, just as it annoyed Alice when she was told that she was only “Something in the Red King’s dream,” but Coryndon could not help his sensations.  Mrs. Wilder was smiling with her careless, easy, confident smile, and yet he saw only an unaccounted bit of the puzzle, that he could not fit in.  She was dressed in the latest fashion, and talked with a kind of regal amiability, but nevertheless, she was not a real woman, a real hostess, or a positive entity; she was vague, and the touch of her floating personality added to the baffled sensation that drained Coryndon’s mind of concentrated force, and made him physically exhausted.

Wilder had something to say to Hartley, and Coryndon handed himself over like a coat or an umbrella to Mrs. Wilder, who, he knew, was placing a low valuation upon him, and was already a little impatient at his lack of vitality.  She was calling him a bore, behind her fine, hard eyes, and having exhausted Mangadone in a few sentences, wondered what sort of bore he really was.  There were golf bores, fishing bores, and shooting bores, but Coryndon hardly appeared to belong to any of those families, and she began to suspect him of “superiority,” a type of bore aggressive to others of his cult.  Mrs. Wilder did not tolerate a type to which she herself undoubtedly owned to some slight connection, and she gave up all effort to awaken interest in the slim, weary young man, who looked half-asleep.

“Mr. Heath ought to be here directly,” she said, in her loud, clear voice.  “Draycott, don’t forget to ask him to say grace.”

If she had got up and taken Coryndon by the shoulders and shaken him, the effect could not have been more marked and sudden.  All the dull feeling of detachment cleared off at once, and he knew that his senses were sharp and acute; his bodily fatigue fell away, and as he moved in his chair his eyes turned towards the door.

“I wish he would hurry,” growled Wilder, a prey to the pessimism of the half-hour before dinner.  “He is inexcusably late as it is.”

As though his words had summoned the Rev. Francis Heath, footsteps mounting the staircase followed Wilder’s remark, and the clergyman came into the room.  Immediately upon his coming, conversation became general, and a few moments later the party was seated round a small table kept for intimate gatherings, and placed in the centre of the large teak-panelled room.  An arrangement of plumbago and maidenhair, and pale blue shaded candles casting a dim light, carried out the saxe blue effect that Mrs. Wilder had evolved with the assistance of a ladies’ paper that dealt with “effective and original table decoration.”