you may bring brilliant talkers into your home, you cannot always 
make them talk brilliantly, or even talk at all; what is worse you 
cannot restrict the output of those starling-voiced dullards who 
seem to have, on all subjects, so much to say that was well worth 
leaving unsaid.  One group that Francesca passed was discussing a 
Spanish painter, who was forty-three, and had painted thousands of 
square yards of canvas in his time, but of whom no one in London 
had heard till a few months ago; now the starling-voices seemed 
determined that one should hear of very little else.  Three women 
knew how his name was pronounced, another always felt that she must 
go into a forest and pray whenever she saw his pictures, another 
had noticed that there were always pomegranates in his later 
compositions, and a man with an indefensible collar knew what the 
pomegranates "meant."  "What I think so splendid about him," said a 
stout lady in a loud challenging voice, "is the way he defies all 
the conventions of art while retaining all that the conventions 
stand for."  "Ah, but have you noticed - " put in the man with the 
atrocious collar, and Francesca pushed desperately on, wondering 
dimly as she went, what people found so unsupportable in the 
affliction of deafness.  Her progress was impeded for a moment by a 
couple engaged in earnest and voluble discussion of some 
smouldering question of the day; a thin spectacled young man with 
the receding forehead that so often denotes advanced opinions, was 
talking to a spectacled young woman with a similar type of 
forehead, and exceedingly untidy hair.  It was her ambition in life 
to be taken for a Russian girl-student, and she had spent weeks of 
patient research in trying to find out exactly where you put the 
tea-leaves in a samovar.  She had once been introduced to a young 
Jewess from Odessa, who had died of pneumonia the following week; 
the experience, slight as it was, constituted the spectacled young 
lady an authority on all things Russian in the eyes of her 
immediate set.

"Talk is helpful, talk is needful," the young man was saying, "but 
what we have got to do is to lift the subject out of the furrow of 
indisciplined talk and place it on the threshing-floor of practical 
discussion."

The young woman took advantage of the rhetorical full-stop to dash 
in with the remark which was already marshalled on the tip of her 
tongue.

"In emancipating the serfs of poverty we must be careful to avoid 
the mistakes which Russian bureaucracy stumbled into when 
liberating the serfs of the soil."

She paused in her turn for the sake of declamatory effect, but 
recovered her breath quickly enough to start afresh on level terms 
with the young man, who had jumped into the stride of his next 
sentence.

"They got off to a good start that time," said Francesca to 
herself; "I suppose it's the Prevention of Destitution they're 
hammering at.  What on earth would become of these dear good people 
if anyone started a crusade for the prevention of mediocrity?"

Midway through one of the smaller rooms, still questing for an 
elusive presence, she caught sight of someone that she knew, and 
the shadow of a frown passed across her face.  The object of her 
faintly signalled displeasure was Courtenay Youghal, a political 
spur-winner who seemed absurdly youthful to a generation that had 
never heard of Pitt.  It was Youghal's ambition - or perhaps his 
hobby - to infuse into the greyness of modern political life some 
of the colour of Disraelian dandyism, tempered with the correctness 
of Anglo-Saxon taste, and supplemented by the flashes of wit that 
were inherent from the Celtic strain in him.  His success was only 
a half-measure.  The public missed in him that touch of blatancy 
which it looks for in its rising public men; the decorative 
smoothness of his chestnut-golden hair, and the lively sparkle of 
his epigrams were counted to him for good, but the restrained 
sumptuousness of his waistcoats and cravats were as wasted efforts.  
If he had habitually smoked cigarettes in a pink coral mouthpiece, 
or worn spats of Mackenzie tartan, the great heart of the voting-
man, and the gush of the paragraph-makers might have been 
unreservedly his.  The art of public life consists to a great 
extent of knowing exactly where to stop and going a bit further.

It was not Youghal's lack of political sagacity that had brought 
the momentary look of disapproval into Francesca's face.  The fact 
was that Comus, who had left off being a schoolboy and was now a 
social problem, had lately enrolled himself among the young 
politician's associates and admirers, and as the boy knew and cared 
nothing about politics, and merely copied Youghal's waistcoats, 
and, less successfully, his conversation, Francesca felt herself 
justified in deploring the intimacy.  To a woman who dressed well 
on comparatively nothing a year it was an anxious experience to 
have a son who dressed sumptuously on absolutely nothing.

The cloud that had passed over her face when she caught sight of 
the offending Youghal was presently succeeded by a smile of 
gratified achievement, as she encountered a bow of recognition and 
welcome from a portly middle-aged gentleman, who seemed genuinely 
anxious to include her in the rather meagre group that he had 
gathered about him.

"We were just talking about my new charge," he observed genially, 
including in the "we" his somewhat depressed-looking listeners, who 
in all human probability had done none of the talking.  "I was just 
telling them, and you may be interested to hear this - "