with one's fingers,
and lighting a big fire outside one's tent to keep off the lions and
tigers. Fancy your being on one side of the fire and the lions and
tigers on the other, grinning at you through the flames!" Then Lady
Glencora strove to look like a lion, and grinned at herself in the
glass.

"That sort of grin wouldn't frighten me," said Alice.

"I dare say not. I have been reading about it in that woman's
travels. Oh, here they are, and I mustn't make any more faces.
Duchess, do come to the fire. I hope you've got warm again. This is
my cousin, Miss Vavasor."

The Duchess made a stiff little bow of condescension, and then
declared that she was charmingly warm. "I don't know how you manage
in your house, but the staircases are so comfortable. Now at
Longroyston we've taken all the trouble in the world,--put down
hot-water pipes all over the house, and everything else that could be
thought of, and yet, you can't move about the place without meeting
with draughts at every corner of the passages." The Duchess spoke
with an enormous emphasis on every other word, sometimes putting so
great a stress on some special syllable, as almost to bring her voice
to a whistle. This she had done with the word "pipes" to a great
degree,--so that Alice never afterwards forgot the hot-water pipes
of Longroyston. "I was telling Lady Glencora, Miss Palliser, that I
never knew a house so warm as this,--or, I'm sorry to say,"--and
here the emphasis was very strong on the word sorry,--"so cold as
Longroyston." And the tone in which Longroyston was uttered would
almost have drawn tears from a critical audience in the pit of a
playhouse. The Duchess was a woman of about forty, very handsome, but
with no meaning in her beauty, carrying a good fixed colour in her
face, which did not look like paint, but which probably had received
some little assistance from art. She was a well-built, sizeable
woman, with good proportions and fine health,--but a fool. She had
addressed herself to one Miss Palliser; but two Miss Pallisers,
cousins of Plantagenet Palliser, had entered the room at the same
time, of whom I may say, whatever other traits of character they may
have possessed, that at any rate they were not fools.

"It's always easy to warm a small house like this," said Miss
Palliser, whose Christian names, unfortunately for her, were
Iphigenia Theodata, and who by her cousin and sister was called
Iphy--"and I suppose equally difficult to war