Mrs. Winstone won the admiration¹ of her distinguished² circle and the high approval of the duke for the tact³ with which she managed Julia’s destinies at this period. As the bride’s husband was away and she had neither entered society as a maid nor in company with her legal owner, her appearance at balls and formal dinners would have created a scandal. Nevertheless, she must be educated, and Mrs. Winstone cut the difference with her never failing acumen⁴. Her own drawing-room was thronged⁵ with “the world” nearly every afternoon; she gave many small dinners to the smartest dissenters⁶ from middle-class morality that she knew; it was the era of the problem play, and Julia saw them all, as well as the “halls,” with their strange company in the lobbies; Nigel Herbert and one or two other admirers were encouraged; and the most modern and extreme of the psychological novels and plays littered the room above the mews.

But Julia, although some glimmerings of life’s realities were beginning to penetrate⁷ the serene⁸ unconsciousness of childhood (enough to induce in her a certain reserve of speech), was far too rushed and bewildered to comprehend more than one-hundredth part of what she heard and saw—the novels and plays she was too tired in her few solitary⁹ moments to open. Shopping, fitting, luncheons¹⁰, dinners, the afternoon gatherings¹¹, the theatre, the constant buzz of conversation about politics and scandal, kept the surface of her mind

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