Mrs.Alan Hosack made a most effective picture with her black hair and white skin in a geranium-colored frock--a Van Beers study to the life.

Mrs.Noel d'Oyly lent an air of opulence to the box, being one of those lovely but all too ample women who, while compelling admiration, dispel intimacy.
Joan, a young daffodil, sat bolt upright among them, with diamonds glistening in her hair like dew.

Of the four men, Gilbert Palgrave, standing where he could be seen, might have been an illustration by Du Maurier of one of Ouida's impossible guardsmen.

He made the other three, all of the extraordinary ordinary type, appear fifty per cent, more manly than they really were--the young old Hosack with his groomlike face and immaculate clothes, the burly Howard Cannon, who retained a walrus mustache in the face of persistent chaff, and Noel d'Oyly, who when seen with his Junoesque wife made the gravest naturalists laugh at the thought of the love manners of the male and female spider.
Turning her chair round, Alice touched Joan's arm.

"Will you do something for me ?" she asked.
Joan looked at her with a smile of disturbing frankness.