Miss Allison thought that Silas Kane's sixtieth-birthday party was going off rather better than anyone had imagined it would. Such family gatherings—for the Mansells, through long business partnership with Silas, might almost be ranked as relatives—were, in Miss Allison's sage opinion, functions to be attended in a spirit of considerable trepidation. Nor had this one promised well at its inception. To begin with, Silas was at polite variance with old Joseph Mansell. Their disagreement was purely on a matter of business, but although Joseph Mansell, a husband and a father, had existence outside the offices of Kane and Mansell, Silas and his business were one and indivisible. He was not, at the best of times, a man who contributed largely to the gaiety of an evening party. He was invariably civil, in an Old-World style that seemed to suit his neat little imperial and the large stock-ties he wore, and he would listen as patiently to a discussion on Surrealism as to the description of the bird life on the Fame Islands which was being imparted to him at the moment by Agatha Mansell. Both subjects bored him, but he inclined his head with an assumption of interest, smiled kindly and coldly, and said Indeed! or Is that so? at the proper moments.

Miss Allison, glancing from his thin, pale face, with its austere mouth, and its calm, aloof eyes, to Mrs. Mansell's countenance, wondered whether a realisation of her host's complete indifference to her conversation would shake Agatha Mansell's magnificent assurance.

Probably it would not. Mrs. Mansell had been to college in the days when such a distinction earned for a woman the title of Bluestocking and the right to think herself superior to her less fortunate sisters. She had preserved through thirty years this pleasant feeling of superiority and an alarmingly cultured voice which could make itself heard without the least vulgar effort above any number of less commanding accents.