His eyes followed her with that incomparably pleasant society smile which he had no doubt inherited from his father.

Then he turned and mingled with the well-dressed throng, bowing where he ought to bow--asking with fervour for dances in plain but influential quarters where dances were to be easily obtained.
And all the while his father and Lady Cantourne watched.
"Yes, I THINK," the lady was saying, "that that is the favoured one." "I fear so." "I noticed," observed Lady Cantourne, "that he asked for a dance." "And apparently got one--or more." "Apparently so, Sir John." "Moreover--" Lady Cantourne turned on him with her usual vivacity.
"Moreover ?" she repeated.
"He did not need to write it down on the card; it was written there already." She closed her fan with a faint smile "I sometimes wonder," she said, "whether, in our young days, you were so preternaturally observant as you are now." "No," he answered, "I was not.

I affected scales of the very opaquest description, like the rest of my kind." In the meantime this man's son was going about his business with a leisurely savoir-faire which few could rival.

Jack Meredith was the beau-ideal of the society man in the best acceptation of the word.

One met him wherever the best people congregated, and he invariably seemed to know what to do and how to do it better than his compeers.