I Forbid the Banns! — page 345: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

CHAPTER XLVI. ON THE PLUNGE. FE, watched her as he gave Mrs. Cyrus P. Bates of Shantyville, Ky., the best advice in his power respect- ing the most effective design for the costume she had set her heart on wearing at a certain fancy ball. It was to take place in July, at a hotel which an American millionaire was about to hire for a week for the entertainment of his _ friends. They were standing in joyous groups around one of the great drawing rooms of Lady Ashenthorpe’s town house, which, as everyone knows, is in Grosvenor Gardens. Lady Ashenthorpe, so soon as she perceived that Bertha was invited everywhere in London, had no hesitation in leaving cards upon her, and asking her, not to the dinner which | Lord Ashenthorpe had suggested, but to this ‘‘ At Home,”’ which was supposed to be very select, only four or five hun- dred persons having been invited. Bertha and Julian had, of course, been forced apart shortly after reaching the drawing rooms; and now he was in Mrs. Cyrus P. Bates’ group, and she was seated between a Royal Academician and her old friend the Parliamentary Nuisance. The government were in great hope that, by judicious treatment of the Nuisance, he might be made as intolerable to the enemies of the government as he now was to the members of the government themselves. A dead wall which, upon ordinary occasions, may seem but an irritating blot on the landscape, may, in time of war, serve as an invaluable protection to a skirmishing party. When an unpleasant question was put to the head of any depart- 335 (E(0) CONNIELIOOKS