ery great beauty feels that she is to be
unjustly condemned to death between forty and fifty, and that every day
of her life brings her nearer to ignominious public execution; and
though beauties manage to last longer, yet is their strength but sorrow
and weakness, depending largely on the hairdresser, the dentist, the
dressmaker and other functions of the unknown quantities _x_ and _y_,
as the mathematicians say.

The Emperor Tiberius is reported to have said that if a man does not
know what is good for him when he is forty years old, he must be either
a fool or a physician. Similarly, a woman who does not know her own
good points at twenty is either very foolish, or a raving beauty--or a
saint. Perhaps women can be all three; it is not safe to assert
anything positively about them. Margaret Donne was clever, she was a
good girl but not a saint, and she was a little more than fairly
good-looking. That was all, and she knew her good points. If she was
not perpetually showing them to advantage, she at least realised what
they were and that she might some day have to make the most of them.
They were her complexion, her mouth and her figure; and she was clever,
if cleverness be a 'point' in a human being, which is doubtful. It is
not considered one in a puppy.

Mr. Lushington discouraged the familiarity of men who called him plain
'Lushington.' When they were older than he, he felt that they were
patronising him; if they were younger, he thought them distinctly
cheeky. Occasionally he fell in with a relation, or an old
schoolfellow, who addressed him as 'Ned,' or even as 'Eddie,' This made
him utterly miserable; in the language of Johnson, when Mr. Lushington
was called 'Eddie,' he was convolved with agony--especially if a third
person chanced to be present. Margaret sometimes wondered whether she
should ever be in a position to use that weapon.

There was a possibility of it, depending on her own choice. In fact,
there were two possibilities, for she could marry him if she pleased,
or she could make an intimate friend of him, and they might then call
each other by their Christian names. At the present time she knew him
so well that she avoided using his name altogether, and he called her
'Miss Margaret' when he was pleased, and 'Miss Donne' when he was not.

'It is a pity you think me clever,' she said demurely, after a little
pause.

'Why?' he inquired severely.

'The idea makes you so uncomfortable,' Margaret ans