by this suicidal habit? No plum has
a sweeter bloom or more delicious texture than the skin of your
young face; but this mineral filth hides that delicate texture, and
substitutes a dry, uniform appearance, more like a certain kind of
leprosy than health. Nature made your face the rival of peaches, roses,
lilies; and you say, 'No; I know better than my Creator and my God; my
face shall be like a dusty miller's.' Go into any flour-mill, and there
you shall see men with faces exactly like your friend Miss Lucas's. But
before a miller goes to his sweetheart, he always washes his face. You
ladies would never get a miller down to your level in brains. It is a
miller's DIRTY face our mono-maniacs of woman imitate, not the face a
miller goes a-courting with."

"La! what a fuss about nothing!"

"About nothing! Is your health nothing? Is your beauty nothing? Well,
then, it will cost you nothing to promise me never to put powder on your
face again."

"Very well, I promise. Now what will you do for me?"

"Work for you--write for you--suffer for you--be self-denying for
you--and even give myself the pain of disappointing you now and
then--looking forward to the time when I shall be able to say 'Yes' to
everything you ask me. Ah! child, you little know what it costs me to
say 'No' to YOU."

Rosa put her arms round him and acquiesced. She was one of those who
go with the last speaker; but, for that very reason, the eternal
companionship of so flighty and flirty a girl as Miss Lucas was
injurious to her.

One day Lady Cicely Treherne was sitting with Mrs. Staines, smiling
languidly at her talk, and occasionally drawling out a little plain good
sense, when in came Miss Lucas, with her tongue well hung, as usual, and
dashed into twenty topics in ten minutes.

This young lady in her discourse was like those little oily beetles you
see in small ponds, whose whole life is spent in tacking--confound them
for it!--generally at right angles. What they are in navigation was Miss
Lucas in conversation: tacked so eternally from topic to topic, that no
man on earth, and not every woman, could follow her.

At the sight and sound of her, Lady Cicely congealed and stiffened.
Easy and unpretending with Mrs. Staines, she was all dignity, and even
majesty, in the presence of this chatterbox; and the smoothness with
which the transfiguration was accomplished marked that accomplished
actress the high-bred woman of the world.

Rosa, better ab