ly risen, but there was
no irritation in her voice. "How do you know, Jane, that I don't want
her downstairs?"

The Duchess looked at her with an audacity confirmed by the absence
from her face of everything but the plaintive. "There you are, with your
eternal English false positions! J'aime, moi, les situations nettes--je
rien comprends pas d'autres. It wouldn't be to your honour--to that of
your delicacy--that with your impossible house you SHOULD wish to plant
your girl in your drawing-room. But such a way of keeping her out of it
as throwing her into a worse--!"

"Well, Jane, you do say things to me!" Mrs. Brookenham blandly broke
in. She had sunk back into her chair; her hands, in her lap pressed
themselves together and her wan smile brought a tear into each of her
eyes by the very effort to be brighter. It might have been guessed of
her that she hated to seem to care, but that she had other dislikes too.
"If one were to take up, you know, some of the things you say--!" And
she positively sighed for the wealth of amusement at them of which her
tears were the sign. Her friend could quite match her indifference.
"Well, my child, TAKE them up; if you were to do that with them
candidly, one by one, you would do really very much what I should like
to bring you to. Do you see?" Mrs. Brookenham's failure to repudiate the
vision appeared to suffice, and her visitor cheerfully took a further
jump. "As much of Tishy as she wants--AFTER. But not before."

"After what?"

"Well--say after Mr. Mitchett. Mr. Mitchett won't take her after Mrs.
Grendon."

"And what are your grounds for assuming that he'll take her at all?"
Then as the Duchess hung fire a moment: "Have you got it by chance from
Lord Petherton?"

The eyes of the two women met for a little on this, and there might have
been a consequence of it in the manner of what came. "I've got it from
not being a fool. Men, I repeat, like the girls they marry--"

"Oh I already know your old song! The way they like the girls they
DON'T marry seems to be," Mrs. Brookenham mused, "what more immediately
concerns us. You had better wait till you HAVE made Aggie's fortune
perhaps--to be so sure of the working of your system. Pardon me,
darling, if I don't take you for an example until you've a little more
successfully become one. I know what the sort of men worth speaking of
are not looking for. They ARE looking for smart safe sensible English
girls."

The Duchess glanced at