lady you have introduced to our old friend would be important."
"She might be much more so than she ever will be."
Lady Agnes got up, to terminate the scene, and even to signify that enough had been said about people and questions she had never heard of. Every one else rose, the waiter brought Nick the receipt of the bill, and Sherringham went on, to his interlocutor—
"Perhaps she will be more so than you think."
"Perhaps—if you take an interest in her!"
"A mystic voice seems to exhort me to do so, to whisper that, though I have never seen her, I shall find something in her. What do you say, Biddy, shall I take an interest in her?"
Biddy hesitated a moment, coloured a little, felt a certain embarrassment in being publicly treated as an oracle.
"If she's not nice I don't advise it."
"And if she is nice?"
"You advise it still less!" her brother exclaimed, laughing and putting his arm round her.
Lady Agnes looked sombre—she might have been saying to herself: "Dear me, what chance has a girl of mine with a man who's so agog about actresses?" She was disconcerted and distressed; a multitude of incongruous things, all the morning, had been forced upon her attention—displeasing pictures and still more displeasing theories about them, vague portents of perversity on the part of Nicholas, and a strange eagerness on Peter's, learned apparently in Paris, to discuss, with a person who had a tone she never had been exposed
