But the session
in Mr. Palliser's dining-room was not long, and Phineas soon found
himself making his way amidst a throng of coming guests into the
rooms above. His object was to meet Violet Effingham, but, failing
that, he would not be unwilling to say a few more words to Madame Max
Goesler.
He first encountered Lady Laura, to whom he had not spoken as yet,
and, finding himself standing close to her for a while, he asked her
after his late neighbour. "Do tell me one thing, Lady Laura;--who is
Madame Max Goesler, and why have I never met her before?"
"That will be two things, Mr. Finn; but I will answer both questions
as well as I can. You have not met her before, because she was in
Germany last spring and summer, and in the year before that you were
not about so much as you have been since. Still you must have seen
her, I think. She is the widow of an Austrian banker, and has lived
the greater part of her life at Vienna. She is very rich, and has a
small house in Park Lane, where she receives people so exclusively
that it has come to be thought an honour to be invited by Madame Max
Goesler. Her enemies say that her father was a German Jew, living in
England, in the employment of the Viennese bankers, and they say also
that she has been married a second time to an Austrian Count, to whom
she allows ever so much a year to stay away from her.
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