"Why?"
"Oh, various circumstances, of late."
"They did not even ask you to sing," his friend said, in accents of some
surprise.
"They dared not. Didn't you see that most of the people were strangers?
How could Lady Adela be sure that she was not wounding somebody's
susceptibilities by having operatic music on a Sunday evening? She knew
nothing at all about half those people; they were merely names to her,
that she had collected round her in order that she might count herself
in among the arts."
"That ill-conditioned brute Quirk seemed to me to be dominating the
whole thing," said Mangan, rather testily. "It's an awful price to pay
for a few puffs. I wonder a woman like that can bear him to come near
her, but she pets the baboon as if he were a King Charles spaniel.
Linnie, my boy, you're no longer first favorite. I can see that;
self-interest has proved too strong; the flattering little review, the
complimentary little notice, has ousted you. It isn't you who are
privileged to meet my Lady Morgan in the street--
'And then to gammon her, in the _Examiner_,
With a paragraph short and sweet.'
Well, now, tell me about that very striking-looking girl, or woman,
rather, whom you took in to dinner.
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