It was to her an evening of triumph--triumph innocent,
harmless, and complete. Her charm, her personality had by now captured
the whole party, save for an opposition of three--and the three realized
that they had for the moment no chance of influencing the popular voice.
The rugged face of Mr. Barton stiffened as she approached; it seemed to
him that the night before he had been snubbed by a chit, and he was not
the man to forget it easily. Alicia Drake was a little pale and a little
silent during the evening, till, late in its course, she succeeded in
carrying off a group of young men who had come for the shoot and were
staying the night, and in establishing a noisy court among them Mrs.
Fotheringham disapproved, by now, of almost everything that concerned
Miss Mallory: of her taste in music or in books, of the touch of
effusion in her manner, which was of course "affected" or
"aristocratic"; of the enthusiasms she did _not_ possess, no less than
of those She did. On the sacred subject of the suffrage, for instance,
which with Mrs. Fotheringham was a matter for propaganda everywhere and
at all times, Diana was but a cracked cymbal, when struck she gave back
either no sound at all, or a wavering one.
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