e did not hold out his hand, or appear to see hers half
extended.

The three women mounted the staircase together, then went different
ways. Miss Lister trailed away down a passage to the right, her aunt
trotting in her wake.

"There's been a tiff there," said Mrs. Parker Bangs.

"Poor thing!" said Miss Lister softly. "I like her. She's a real good
sort. I should have thought she would have been more sensible than the
rest of us."

"A real plain sort," said her aunt, ignoring the last sentence.

"Well, she didn't make her own face," said Miss Lister generously.

"No, and she don't pay other people to make it for her. She's what Sir
Walter Scott calls: 'Nature in all its ruggedness.'"

"Dear aunt," remarked Miss Lister wearily, "I wish you wouldn't trouble
to quote the English classics to me when we are alone. It is pure waste
of breath, because you see I KNOW you have read them all. Here is my
door. Now come right in and make yourself comfy on that couch. I am
going to sit in this palatial arm-chair opposite, and do a little very
needful explaining. My! How they fix one to the floor! These ancestral
castles are all right so far as they go, but they don't know a thing
about rockers. Now I have a word or two to say about Miss Champion.
She's a real good sort, and I like her. She's not a beauty; but she has
a fine figure, and she dresses right. She has heaps of money, and could
have rarer pearls than mine; but she knows better than to put pearls on
that brown skin. I like a woman who knows her limitations and is
sensible over them. All the men adore her, not for what she looks but
for what she is, and, my word, aunt, that's what pays in the long run.
That is what lasts. Ten years hence the Honourable Jane will still be
what she is, and I shall be trying to look what I'm not. As for Garth
Dalmain, he has eyes for all of us and a heart for none. His pretty
speeches and admiring looks don't mean marriage, because he is a man
with an ideal of womanhood and he can't see himself marrying below it.
If the Sistine Madonna could step down off those clouds and hand the
infant to the young woman on her left, he might marry HER; but even
then he would be afraid he might see some one next day who did her hair
more becomingly, or that her foot would not look so well on his Persian
rugs as it does on that cloud. He won't marry money, because he has
plenty of it. And even if he hadn't, money made in candles would not
appeal to him