"I don't know him!" cried the Duchess, protesting. "If you like him--of
course it's all right. Was he--was he very agreeable last night?" she
added, slyly.

"What a word to apply to anybody or anything connected with last night!"

"Are you very sore, Julie?"

"Well, on this very day of being turned out it hurts. I wonder who is
writing Lady Henry's letters for her this afternoon?"

"I hope they are not getting written," said the Duchess, savagely; "and
that she's missing you abominably. Good-bye--_au revoir!_ If I am twenty
minutes late with Clarisse, I sha'n't get any fitting, duchess or
no duchess."

And the little creature hurried off; not so fast, however, but that she
found time to leave a number of parting instructions as to the house
with the Scotch caretaker, on her way to her carriage.

Julie rose and made her way down to the drawing-room again. The
Scotchwoman saw that she wanted to be alone and left her.

The windows were still open to the garden outside. Julie examined the
paths, the shrubberies, the great plane-trees; she strained her eyes
towards the mansion itself. But not much of it could be seen. The little
house at the corner had been carefully planted out.

What wealth it implied--that space and size, in London! Evidently the
house was still shut up. The people who owned it were now living the
same cumbrous, magnificent life in the country which they would soon
come up to live in the capital. Honors, parks, money, birth--all were
theirs, as naturally as the sun rose. Julie envied and hated the big
house and all it stood for; she flung a secret defiance at this coveted
and elegant Mayfair that lay around her, this heart of all that is
recognized, accepted, carelessly sovereign in our "materialized"
upper class.

And yet all the while she knew that it was an unreal and passing
defiance. She would not be able in truth to free herself from the
ambition to live and shine in this world of the English rich and well
born. For, after all, as she told herself with rebellious passion, it
was or ought to be her world. And yet her whole being was sore from the
experiences of these three years with Lady Henry--from those, above all,
of the preceding twenty-four hours. She wove no romance about herself.
"I should have dismissed myself long ago," she would have said,
contemptuously, to any one who could have compelled the disclosure of
her thoughts. But the long and miserable struggle of her self-love wit