At the very same moment, rather to her amusement, the door was flung open, and a young man entered the room.

Katharine, as she shook hands with him, asked him, in her own mind, "Now, do you think we're enjoying ourselves enormously ?"...

"Mr.Denham, mother," she said aloud, for she saw that her mother had forgotten his name.
That fact was perceptible to Mr.Denham also, and increased the awkwardness which inevitably attends the entrance of a stranger into a room full of people much at their ease, and all launched upon sentences.
At the same time, it seemed to Mr.Denham as if a thousand softly padded doors had closed between him and the street outside.

A fine mist, the etherealized essence of the fog, hung visibly in the wide and rather empty space of the drawing-room, all silver where the candles were grouped on the tea-table, and ruddy again in the firelight.

With the omnibuses and cabs still running in his head, and his body still tingling with his quick walk along the streets and in and out of traffic and foot-passengers, this drawing-room seemed very remote and still; and the faces of the elderly people were mellowed, at some distance from each other, and had a bloom on them owing to the fact that the air in the drawing-room was thickened by blue grains of mist.