ng for Esther to have done. She should have
"received" him--that was the phrase--and helped him build up his
life--another phrase. This they delicately conveyed to her in accepted
innuendos Addington knew how to handle. Esther once told Aunt Patricia
there were women selected by the other women to "do their dirty work ".
But what she really meant was that Addington had a middle-aged few of
the old stock who, with an arrogant induration in their own position,
out of which no attacking humour could deliver them, held, as they
judged, the contract to put questions. These it was who would ask Esther
over a cup of tea: "Are you going on living in this house, my dear?" or:
"Shall you join your husband at his father's? And will his father and
the step-children stay on there?" And the other women, of a more
circuitous method or a more sensitive touch, would listen and, Esther
felt sure, discuss afterward what the inquisitors had found out: with an
amused horror of the inquisitors and a grateful relish of the result.
Esther sometimes thought she must cry aloud in answer; but though a
flush came into her face and gave her an added pathos, she managed, in a
way of gentle obstinacy, to say nothing, and still not to offend. And
Madame Beattie sat by, never saving her, as Esther knew she might, out
of her infernal cleverness, but imperturbably and lightly amused and
smoking cigarettes all over the tea things. As a matter of fact, the tea
things and their exquisite cloth were unpolluted, but Esther saw
figuratively the trail of smoke and ashes, like a nicotian Vesuvius,
over the home. She still hated cigarettes, which Addington had not yet
accepted as a feminine diversion, though she had the slight comfort of
knowing it forgave in Madame Beattie what it would not have tolerated
in an Addingtonian. "Foreign ways," the ladies would remark to one
another. "And she really is a very distinguished woman. They say she
visits everywhere abroad."

Anne and Lydia were generally approved as modest and pretty girls; and
Miss Amabel's classes in national dances became an exceedingly
interesting feature of the town life. Anne and Lydia were in this
dancing scheme all over. They were enchanted with it, the strangeness
and charm of these odd citizens of another world, and made friends with
little workwomen out of the shops, and went home with them to see old
pieces of silver and embroidery, and plan pageants--this in the limited
English common to the