Miss Merrivale did feel that the company assembled was an odd one,
although she lived too far away to appreciate the fact that none of the
guests, with the possible exception of Rangely, were exactly what she
would have been asked to dine with at home. A country member, a self-
made vulgarian, an antiquated spinster, and a literateur who, after
all, was received rather upon sufferance into such exclusive houses as
he entered at all, made up a group of which Miss Merrivale, with
feminine instinct, felt the inferiority, despite the fact that she had
no means of placing the guests. Miss Penwick appreciated the social
standing of her fellow-diners, but she had by a long course of social
humiliations come to accept unpleasant conditions where getting a
dinner was concerned; and she was, moreover, somewhat relieved that at
Mrs. Sampson's she was not obliged to meet anybody worse. Her instincts
were keen enough, after all her melancholy experiences, to enable her
to recognize the fact that Tom Greenfield was the most truly a
gentleman of the three men, and she was pleased that he should take her
in to dinner.
Mrs. Sampson, as she went in on the arm of Irons, contrived to let him
know what she had heard that morning from young Stanton of Greenfield's
interest in the young sculptor; adding a hint or two of the use to be
made of this information.
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