“Is it not a change for no Nina to be in the theatre?  But there is one that is glad—­oh, very glad!  Miss Burgoyne rejoices!”—­and Estelle, as she passed on, made use of a phrase in French, which, perhaps fortunately, he did not understand.

After the performance, he went up to the Garden Club—­he did not care to go home to his own rooms and sit thinking.  And the first person he saw after he passed into the long coffee-room was Octavius Quirk, who was seated all by himself devouring a Gargantuan supper.

“This is luck,” Lionel said to himself.  “Maurice’s Jabberwock will begin with his blatherskite nonsense—­it will be something to pass the time.”

But on the contrary, as it turned out, the short, fat man with the unwholesome complexion was not at this moment in the humor for frothy and windy invective about nothing; perhaps the abundant supper had mollified him; he was quite suave.

“Ah, Moore,” said he, “haven’t seen you since you came back from Scotland.  It was awfully kind of Lady Adela to send me a haunch of venison.”

“It would serve you for one meal, I suppose,” Lionel thought; he did not say so.

“I dine with them to-morrow night,” continued Mr. Quirk, complacently.

“Oh, indeed,” said Lionel?  Lady Adela seemed rather in a hurry, immediately on her return to town, to secure her tame critic.

“Very good dinners they give you up there at Campden Hill,” Mr. Quirk resumed, as he took out a big cigar from his case.  “Excellent—­excellent—­and the people very well chosen, too, if it weren’t for that loathsome brute, Quincey Hooper.  Why do they tolerate a fellow like that—­the meanest lick-spittle and boot-blacker to any Englishman who has got a handle to his name, while all the time he is writing in his wretched Philadelphia rag every girding thing he can think of against England.  Comparison, comparison, continually—­and far more venomous than the foolish, feeble sort of stuff which is only Anglophobia and water; and yet Hooper hasn’t the courage to speak out either—­it’s a morbid envy of England that is afraid to declare itself openly and can only deal in hints and innuendoes.  What can Lady Adela see in a fellow like that?  Of course he writes puffing paragraphs about her and sends them to her; but what good are they to her, coming from America?  She wants to be recognized as a clever woman by her own set.  She appeals to the dii majorum gentium; what does she care for the verdict of Washington or Philadelphia or New York?”

Well, Lionel had no opinion to express on this point; on a previous occasion he had wondered why these two augurs had not been content to agree, seeing that the wide Atlantic rolled between their respective spheres of operation.

“I have been favored,” resumed Mr. Quirk, more blandly, “with a sight of some portions of Lady Adela’s new novel.”

“Already?”

“Oh, it isn’t nearly finished yet; but she has had the earlier chapters set up in type, so that she could submit them to—­to her particular friends, in fact.  You haven’t seen them?” asked Mr. Quirk, lifting his heavy and boiled-gooseberry eyes and looking at Lionel.