After the first blush, the first reconnaissance of the two Bigwigs between whom she sat, her eyes WOULD stray and her ears would only half listen to them.

Indeed, half her ears, she soon found out, were quite enough to deal with Colonel Martlett and Sir John Fanfar.

Across the azaleas she let her glance come now and again to anchor on her father's face, and exchanged with him a most enjoyable blink.

She tried once or twice to get through to Alan, but he was always eating; he looked very like a young Uncle Stanley this evening.
What was she feeling?
Short, quick stabs of self-consciousness as to how she was looking; a sort of stunned excitement due to sheer noise and the number of things offered to her to eat and drink; keen pleasure in the consciousness that Colonel Martlett and Sir John Fanfar and other men, especially that nice one with the straggly moustache who looked as if he were going to bite, glanced at her when they saw she wasn't looking.

If only she had been quite certain that it was not because they thought her too young to be there! She felt a sort of continual exhilaration, that this was the great world--the world where important things were said and done, together with an intense listening expectancy, and a sense most unexpected and almost frightening, that nothing important was being said or would be done.