utifully definite. She marvelled at her indifference to
her own shortcomings, and she marvelled at the strength of personality
that could so dispense with other people's furnishings.

Among the things that Helen made her see, freshly and perturbingly, was
the sheaf of friends in England of whom she had thought with such
security when Miss Robinson had spoken of the London _salon_.

Althea had been trained in a school of severe social caution. Social
caution was personified to her in her memory of her mother--a slender,
black-garbed lady, with parted grey hair, neatly waved along her brow,
and a tortoiseshell lorgnette that she used to raise, mildly yet
alarmingly, at foreign _tables d'hotes_, for an appraising survey of the
company. The memory of this lorgnette operated with Althea as a sort of
social standard; it typified delicacy, dignity, deliberation, a
scrupulous regard for the claims of heredity, and a scrupulous avoidance
of uncertain or all too certain types. Althea felt that she had carried
on the tradition worthily. The lorgnette would have passed all her more
recent friends--those made with only its inspiration as a guide. She was
as careful as her mother as to whom she admitted to her
acquaintanceship, eschewing in particular those of her compatriots whose
accents or demeanour betrayed them to her trained discrimination as
outside the radius of acceptance. But Althea's kindness of heart was
even deeper than her caution, and much as she dreaded becoming involved
with the wrong sort of people, she dreaded even more hurting anybody's
feelings, with the result that once or twice she had made mistakes, and
had had, under the direction of Lady Blair, to withdraw in a manner as
painful to her feelings as to her pride. 'Oh no, my dear,' Lady Blair
had said of some English acquaintances whom Althea had met in Rome, and
who had asked her to come and see them in England. 'Quite impossible;
most worthy people, I am sure, and no doubt the daughter took honours
at Girton--the middle classes are highly educated nowadays; but one
doesn't know that sort of people.'

Lady Blair was the widow of a judge, and, in her large velvet
drawing-room, a thick fog outside and a number of elderly legal ladies
drinking tea about her, Althea had always felt herself to be in the very
heart of British social safety. Lady Blair was an old friend of her
mother's, and, with Miss Buckston, was her nearest English friend. She
also felt safe on