Everybody who is anybody is here. All the lords and the ladies, the honourables and dishonourables, the hangers on to aristocratic skirts, the _nouveau riche_, the pet parsons and actors, eligibles and detrimentals, and the black sheep, that go towards composing the “upper current.” The spacious rooms teem with handsome thoroughbred men, and lovely well-_dressed_?--women. And yet “they come! they come,” though the clocks are chiming midnight and Coote and Tinney’s Band has been pouring out its softest strains for two hours.
The host and hostess are still on duty near the entrance, all ready to be photographed; so we’ll just take them.
Lord Beranger is tall and thin. His hair is so fair that the silver threads thickly intersecting it are hardly visible. His eyes are blue--the very light blue that denotes either insincerity or imbecility--his smile is too bland to be genuine, his talk is measured to match his gait, and he lives the artificial life of so many of his brotherhood, to whom the opinion of “the world” is everything.
Lady Beranger is fair, fat and forty--and a hypocrite--as she awaits her tardy guests, so weary, that under the shelter of her long trailing blue velvet skirts and _point de gaze_, she indulges in the gallinacious tendency of standing first on one leg and then on the other--her expression is as sweet as if she delighted to be a martyr to these late votaries of fashion.
Only once she loses sight of worldliness, and permits the ghost of a frown to flit across her brow, as she whispers to her husband:
“Is Zai with Delaval? I don’t see that Conway anywhere!”
Lord Beranger shrugs his shoulders and answers nothing. Achille’s best efforts in _Salmis de Gibier, sauce Chasseur and Baba au Rhum_, are just ready, and he is evolving the momentous point of who he should take in. He would not make an error in such an important thing as precedence for all the world! a regular society man is always a stickler for absurd little trifles like these. Does the handsome Duchess of Allchester rank higher than the elegant and younger Duchess of Eastminster? He turns up his light blue eyes and puckers his forehead in the vain hope of calling up to mind the date of the dukedoms, but it is futile; this salient fact has entirely slipped from his memory. So he goes in search of the patrician lady who finds most favour in his sight.