I can't have you in
the drawing-room, I have to talk business with Milord, but you can go
out for a walk with Alice--it isn't raining to-day.'

'Oh! no; I couldn't go out to walk with Alice, it would bore me to
death. She never talks about anything that interests me.'

Vanished the sweet pastel-like expression of Mrs. Barton's features,
lost in a foreseeing of the trouble this plain girl would be. Partners
would have to be found, and to have her dragging after her all through
the Castle season would be intolerable. And all these airs of virtue,
and injured innocence, how insupportable they were! Alice, as far as
Mrs. Barton could see, was fit for nothing. Even now, instead of helping
to console her sister, and win her thoughts away from Captain Hibbert,
she shut herself up to read books. Such a taste for reading and moping
she had never seen in a girl before--_voila un type de vieille fille_.
Whom did she take after? Certainly not after her mother, nor yet her
father. But what was the good of thinking of the tiresome girl? There
were plenty of other things far more important to consider, and the
first thing of all was--how to make Olive forget Captain Hibbert? On
this point Mrs. Barton was not quite satisfied with the manner in which
she had played her part. Olive's engagement had been broken off by too
violent means, and nothing was more against her nature than (to use her
own expression) _brusquer les choses_. Early in life Mrs. Barton
discovered that she could amuse men, and since then she had devoted
herself assiduously to the cultivation of this talent, and the divorce
between herself and her own sex was from the first complete. She not
only did not seek to please, but she made no attempt to conceal her
aversion from the society of women, and her preference for those forms
of entertainment where they were found in fewest numbers. Balls were,
therefore, never much to her taste; at the dinner-table she was freer,
but it was on the racecourse that she reigned supreme. From the box-seat
of a drag the white hands were waved, the cajoling laugh was set going;
and fashionably-dressed men, with race-glasses about their shoulders,
came crowding and climbing about her like bees about their queen. Mrs.
Barton had passed from flirtation to flirtation without a violent word.
With a wave of her hands she had called the man she wanted; with a wave
of her hands, and a tinkle of the bell-like laugh, she had dismissed
him. As noth