u a
chance to fly at me again, and you must take it out in sulks!' These
were the ideas--ideas of 'fury' and sulks--into which Selina could
translate feelings that sprang from the pure depths of one's conscience.
Mrs. Collingwood protested--she said it was a shame that Laura shouldn't
go in and enjoy herself when she looked so lovely. 'Doesn't she look
lovely?' She appealed to Mrs. Berrington. 'Bless us, what's the use of
being pretty? Now, if she had _my_ face!'

'I think she looks rather cross,' said Selina, getting out with her
friend and leaving her sister to her own inventions. Laura had a vision,
as the carriage drove away again, of what her situation would have been,
or her peace of mind, if Selina and Lionel had been good, attached
people like the Collingwoods, and at the same time of the singularity of
a good woman's being ready to accept favours from a person as to whose
behaviour she had the lights that must have come to the lady in question
in regard to Selina. She accepted favours herself and she only wanted to
be good: that was oppressively true; but if she had not been Selina's
sister she would never drive in her carriage. That conviction was strong
in the girl as this vehicle conveyed her to Grosvenor Place; but it was
not in its nature consoling. The prevision of disgrace was now so vivid
to her that it seemed to her that if it had not already overtaken them
she had only to thank the loose, mysterious, rather ignoble tolerance of
people like Mrs. Collingwood. There were plenty of that species, even
among the good; perhaps indeed exposure and dishonour would begin only
when the bad had got hold of the facts. Would the bad be most horrified
and do most to spread the scandal? There were, in any event, plenty of
them too.

Laura sat up for her sister that night, with that nice question to help
her to torment herself--whether if she was hard and merciless in judging
Selina it would be with the bad too that she would associate herself.
Was she all wrong after all--was she cruel by being too rigid? Was Mrs.
Collingwood's attitude the right one and ought she only to propose to
herself to 'allow' more and more, and to allow ever, and to smooth
things down by gentleness, by sympathy, by not looking at them too hard?
It was not the first time that the just measure of things seemed to slip
from her hands as she became conscious of possible, or rather of very
actual, differences of standard and usage. On this occas