Page:The Yellow Book - 06.djvu/140

 intrinsically good, yet their whole effect was unsatisfactory; her very hair was abundant and ordinary. Yet she was clever—clever enough to know her own defects and to play them off upon other people, clever enough to have begun a fresh career at the age of twenty-six and to have followed it with perseverance and success. She belonged to the few who know how to invest the little capital Nature has given them; and none of the brilliant frequenters of her house who came and talked about themselves to their sympathetic hostess ever suspected that they were really there to establish her personality and not to advertise their own.

A perfectly new dinner-party was the luckiest inspiration that ever came to a tired hostess. To see her guests grouped at small tables, to make them all co-operate in the labour of conversation, to enjoy the triumphant consciousness of having combined them in the happiest manner possible, and to have reduced her own responsibility to the entertaining of three people only, was the highest consummation Mrs. Angelo Milton had ever attained. She sat in complete satisfaction, bathed in the becoming rose-coloured light shed by numerous shaded candles; and she even allowed herself under the influence of the prevailing ease of manner to become almost natural. She had selected her own party with scrupulous care; a pretty débutante for her vis-à-vis, who neither eclipsed nor reflected her; a black and white artist, very new, for herself; and an ugly boy to play with the débutante, which he was doing very charmingly.

"Such an improvement on the ordinary dinner-party," said little Margaret Cousins, with the experience of a first season in her voice.

"Awfully neat idea, is really; no need to listen to what the other chaps are saying, don t you know," said the ugly boy, who was still young, though he had left Cambridge a year ago. "Do