Her mouth was large and rather loose; it had grown baggy by much speaking on public platforms—­a fearsome thing in a woman.  Her face was large and round and white.  Her eyes were dull.  Long ago there must have been depressing moments in the life of Julia P. Mangles—­moments spent in front of her mirror.  But, like the woman of spirit that she was, she had determined that, if she could not be beautiful, she could at all events be great.

One self-deception leads to another.  Miss Mangles sat down and accepted Lady Orlay’s invitation in the full and perfect conviction that she owed it to her greatness.

“Are they abstainers?” she asked, reflectively, going back in her mind over the causes she had championed.

“Nay,” replied Joseph, winking gravely at a policeman in Northumberland Avenue.

“Perhaps Lord Orlay is open to conviction.”

“If you tackle Orlay, you’ll find you’ve bitten off a bigger bit than you can chew,” replied Joseph, who had a singular habit of lapsing into the vulgarest slang when Julia mounted her high horse in the presence of himself only.  When others were present Mr. Mangles seemed to take a sort of pride in this great woman.  Let those explain the attitude who can.

Lady Orlay’s entertainments were popularly said to be too crowded, and no one knew this better than Lady Orlay.

“Let us ask them all and be done with them,” she said; and had said it for thirty years, ever since she had begun a social existence with no other prospects than that which lay in her husband’s brain—­then plain Mr. Orlay.  She had never “done with them,” had never secured that peaceful domestic leisure which had always been her dream and her husband’s dream, and would never secure it.  For these were two persons, now old and white-haired and celebrated, who lived in the great world, and had a supreme contempt for it.

The Mangleses were among the first to arrive, Julia in a dress of rich black silk, with some green about it, and a number of iridescent beetle-wings serving as a relief.  Miss Netty Cahere was a vision of pink and self-effacing quietness.

“We shall know no one,” she said, with a shrinking movement of her shoulders as they mounted the stairs.

“Not even the waiters,” replied Joseph Mangles, in his lugubrious bass, glancing into a room where tea and coffee were set out.  “But they will soon know us.”

They had not been in the room, however, five minutes before an acquaintance entered it, tall and slim, like a cheerful Don Quixote, with the ribbon of a great order across his shirt-front.  He paused for a moment near Lord and Lady Orlay, and his entrance caused, as it usually did, a little stir in the room.  Then he turned and greeted Joseph Mangles.  Over the large, firm hand of that gentleman’s sister he bowed in silence.

“I have nothing to say to that great woman,” he sometimes said.  “She is so elevated that my voice will not reach her.”