the
same distinction of feature, the same supercilious forehead, the same
quivering of the high-bred nose, the same drooping of the unhappy
mouth. Bat the flame of Edith's small steel black eyes revealed a
creature of more ardour and more energy.

At the moment Edith was visited with severe compunction; an intrusive
uncomfortable feeling that she had never before been thus compelled to
entertain. For looking back upon the past two years she perceived that
her conduct as mistress of that drawing-room and house had not always
been as fastidious and refined as she could wish. The house and the
drawing-room were mainly the cause of it. Before Horace became editor
of _The Museion_, Edith had been mistress of a minute establishment
kept up with difficulty on a narrow income. In a drawing-room
seventeen feet by twelve she received with difficulty a small circle
of the cultured; ladies as refined and fastidious as herself, and
(after superhuman efforts on the part of these ladies) occasionally a
preoccupied and superlatively married man. From this position,
compatible with her exclusiveness, but not with her temperament or her
ambition, Edith found herself raised suddenly to a perfect eminence of
culture and refinement as head of the great editor's house. She held a
sort of salon, to which her brother's reputation attracted many
figures if possible more distinguished than his own. She found herself
the object of much flattering attention on the part of persons anxious
to stand well with Horace Jewdwine. With a dignity positively
marvellous in so small a woman, her head held high and made higher
still by the raised roll of her black hair, Edith reigned for three
years in that long drawing-room. She laid down the law grandiloquently
to the young aspirants who thronged her court; she rewarded with
superb compliments those who had achieved. Happily for Edith those
gentlemen were masters of social legerdemain; and they conveyed their
smiles up the sleeves of their dress-coats adroitly unperceived.

And then, in the very flower of her small dynasty, Lucia came. Lucia,
with her music and her youth and her indestructible charm. And the
little court, fickle by its very nature, went over bodily to Lucia! To
Lucia who did not want it, who would much rather have been without it,
but must needs encourage it, play to it, sympathize with it, just to
satisfy that instinct of hers which was so fatal and so blind. And
Horace, who to Edith's gr