rned rest: I'll say that for myself," she continued,
sinking down with a sigh of content on the pillowed lounge near the fire.
"Louisa Bry is a stern task-master: I often used to wish myself back with
the Gormers. Talk of love making people jealous and suspicious--it's
nothing to social ambition! Louisa used to lie awake at night wondering
whether the women who called on us called on ME because I was with her,
or on HER because she was with me; and she was always laying traps to
find out what I thought. Of course I had to disown my oldest friends,
rather than let her suspect she owed me the chance of making a single
acquaintance--when, all the while, that was what she had me there for,
and what she wrote me a handsome cheque for when the season was over!"

Mrs. Fisher was not a woman who talked of herself without cause, and the
practice of direct speech, far from precluding in her an occasional
resort to circuitous methods, served rather, at crucial moments, the
purpose of the juggler's chatter while he shifts the contents of his
sleeves. Through the haze of her cigarette smoke she continued to gaze
meditatively at Miss Bart, who, having dismissed her maid, sat before the
toilet-table shaking out over her shoulders the loosened undulations of
her hair.

"Your hair's wonderful, Lily. Thinner--? What does that matter, when it's
so light and alive? So many women's worries seem to go straight to their
hair--but yours looks as if there had never been an anxious thought under
it. I never saw you look better than you did this evening. Mattie Gormer
told me that Morpeth wanted to paint you--why don't you let him?"

Miss Bart's immediate answer was to address a critical glance to the
reflection of the countenance under discussion. Then she said, with a
slight touch of irritation: "I don't care to accept a portrait from Paul
Morpeth."

Mrs. Fisher mused. "N--no. And just now, especially--well, he can do you
after you're married." She waited a moment, and then went on: "By the
way, I had a visit from Mattie the other day. She turned up here last
Sunday--and with Bertha Dorset, of all people in the world!"

She paused again to measure the effect of this announcement on her
hearer, but the brush in Miss Bart's lifted hand maintained its
unwavering stroke from brow to nape.

"I never was more astonished," Mrs. Fisher pursued. "I don't know two
women less predestined to intimacy--from Bertha's standpoint, that is;
for of cours