The Countess of Lowndes Square and Other Stories/The Oriolists

The Oriolists
In spite of the unaccountable absence of a Cabinet Minister who should have sat between our hostess, Mrs. Withers and Miss Agnes Lockett, I felt that this luncheon-party must be considered as perhaps the most epoch-making that had, up to the present date, been enticed beneath that insatiably hospitable roof. Never had the comet-like orbit of our entertainer ascended quite so high towards the zenith.
With the negligible exception of myself, for whose presence there I shall soon amply account, there was not one among us, man, woman or child (for that prodigy on the fiddle, Dickie Sebastian, in his tight colossal sailor-suit, was of the company) whose name was not thrillingly familiar to the great percentage of the readers of those columns in the daily Press which inform us who was in the park on Sunday chatting with friends, or at the first night of the new play looking lovely.
Briefly to tell the number and brightness of these stars, there was a much be-ribanded general from Salonica, a girl just engaged to the heir of one of our most respectable dukedoms, a repatriated prisoner from Ruhleben, a medium possessed of devastating insight, a prominent actress from a révue,

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