It depends."

An unusual quiet had invaded the drawing-room of Forty-eight Bloomsbury
Square, generally noisy with strident voices about this hour. The
Colonel remained engrossed in his paper. Mrs. Devine sat with her plump
white hands folded on her lap, whether asleep or not it was impossible
to say. The lady who was cousin to a baronet had shifted her chair
beneath the gasolier, her eyes bent on her everlasting crochet work. The
languid Miss Devine had crossed to the piano, where she sat fingering
softly the tuneless keys, her back to the cold barely-furnished room.

"Sit down!" commanded saucily Miss Kite, indicating with her fan the
vacant seat beside her. "Tell me about yourself. You interest me." Miss
Kite adopted a pretty authoritative air towards all youthful-looking
members of the opposite sex. It harmonised with the peach complexion and
the golden hair, and fitted her about as well.

"I am glad of that," answered the stranger, taking the chair suggested.
"I so wish to interest you."

"You're a very bold boy." Miss Kite lowered her fan, for the purpose of
glancing archly over the edge of it, and for the first time encountered
the eyes of the stranger looking into hers. And then it was that Miss
Kite experienced precisely the same curious sensation that an hour or so
ago had troubled Mrs. Pennycherry when the stranger had first bowed to
her. It seemed to Miss Kite that she was no longer the Miss Kite that,
had she risen and looked into it, the fly-blown mirror over the marble
mantelpiece would, she knew, have presented to her view; but quite
another Miss Kite--a cheerful, bright-eyed lady verging on middle age,
yet still good-looking in spite of her faded complexion and somewhat
thin brown locks. Miss Kite felt a pang of jealousy shoot through her;
this middle-aged Miss Kite seemed, on the whole, a more attractive
lady. There was a wholesomeness, a broadmindedness about her that
instinctively drew one towards her. Not hampered, as Miss Kite herself
was, by the necessity of appearing to be somewhere between eighteen and
twenty-two, this other Miss Kite could talk sensibly, even brilliantly:
one felt it. A thoroughly "nice" woman this other Miss Kite; the real
Miss Kite, though envious, was bound to admit it. Miss Kite wished to
goodness she had never seen the woman. The glimpse of her had rendered
Miss Kite dissatisfied with herself.

"I am not a boy," explained the stranger; "and I had no intention of
being