Robin Linnet by E.F. Benson — Read

Lady Gurtner felt on this July evening that she had "arrived," and her face at the end of her table, flushed with triumph, was like the harvest moon over the fields where she had sowed and reaped. She had not precisely sowed in tears, nor had she watered her springing fields with them, for tears do not in the crop she was raising, produce any kind of result, but she had sowed early and late, with winter wheat and summer wheat, spring and autumn, in poetry gatherings, in dinners and concerts and operas and week-ends, and to-night she felt definitely that her harvest was reaped and her barns stacked with golden grain.

All her sowings had helped her, even the poetry-sowings which she had altogether abandoned when she perceived that poetry was considered a nuisance by all but a very small and rather weird and curious set of falsetto people, and to-night, poetry, as a climbing ladder, was represented only by an ancient light who looked rather the worse for wear and want of washing. She had even asked one or two people "to be kind to the poor Duchess," for she was sure that Constance Hampshire was not accustomed to shine among so bright a galaxy of stars as those who to-night sat at the very much extended table in her new house in Curzon Street.