found herself,
with an embarrassment oddly opposed to the positive pitch of her
complexion, in the presence of a group in which it was yet immediately
evident that every one was a friend. Every one, to show no one had been
caught, said something extremely easy; so that it was after a moment
only poor Mrs. Donner who, seated close to her hostess, seemed to be
in any degree in the wrong. This moreover was essentially her fault, so
extreme was the anomaly of her having, without the means to back it
up, committed herself to a "scheme of colour" that was practically an
advertisement of courage. Irregularly pretty and painfully shy, she was
retouched from brow to chin like a suburban photograph--the moral of
which was simply that she should either have left more to nature or
taken more from art. The Duchess had quickly reached her kinsman with a
smothered hiss, an "Edward dear, for God's sake take Aggie!" and at the
end of a few minutes had formed for herself in one of Mrs. Brookenham's
admirable "corners" a society consisting of Lord Petherton and Mr.
Mitchett, the latter of whom regarded Mrs. Donner across the room with
articulate wonder and compassion.

"It's all right, it's all right--she's frightened only at herself!"

The Duchess watched her as from a box at the play, comfortably shut
in, as in the old operatic days at Naples, with a pair of entertainers.
"You're the most interesting nation in the world. One never gets to the
end of your hatred of the nuance. The sense of the suitable, the harmony
of parts--what on earth were you doomed to do that, to be punished
sufficiently in advance, you had to be deprived of it in your very
cradles? Look at her little black dress--rather good, but not so good
as it ought to be, and, mixed up with all the rest, see her type, her
beauty, her timidity, her wickedness, her notoriety and her impudeur.
It's only in this country that a woman is both so shocking and so
shaky." The Duchess's displeasure overflowed. "If she doesn't know how
to be good--"

"Let her at least know how to be bad? Ah," Mitchy replied, "your
irritation testifies more than anything else could do to our peculiar
genius or our peculiar want of it. Our vice is intolerably clumsy--if it
can possibly be a question of vice in regard to that charming child, who
looks like one of the new-fashioned bill-posters, only, in the way of
'morbid modernity,' as Mrs. Brook would say, more extravagant and funny
than any that have