He contemptuously thought of them as belonging to a dead _genre_.

But the man who painted them could _draw_.
Meanwhile he seemed to have lost Madame de Pastourelles, and must needs fall back on the private secretary beside him.

This gentleman, who had already entered him on the tablets of the mind as a mannerless outsider, was not particularly communicative.

But at least Fenwick learned the names of the other guests.

The well-known Ambassador beside Lady Findon, with a shrewd, thin, sulky face, and very black eyes under whitish hair--eyes turned much more frequently on the pretty actress to his right than upon his hostess; a financier opposite, much concerned with great colonial projects; the Cabinet Minister--of no account, it seemed, either in the House or the Cabinet--and his wife, abnormally thin, and far too discreet for the importance of her husband's position; a little farther, the wife of the red-haired Academician, a pale, frightened creature who looked like her husband's apology, and was in truth his slave;--all these he learned gradually to discriminate.
So this was the great world.