said, but with as much stiffness as she might have shown to
his uncle.

'That's over,' said Lady Helen with relief. 'My uncle hardly meets any
of us now without a spar. He has never forgiven my father for going over
to the Liberals. And then he thinks we none of us consult him enough. No
more we do--except Aunt Charlotte. _She's_ afraid of him!'

'Lady Charlotte afraid!' echoed Rose.

'Odd, isn't it? The Duke avenges a good many victims on her, if they
only knew!'

Lady Helen was called away, and Rose was left standing, wondering what
had happened to her partner.

Opposite, Mr. Flaxman was pushing through a doorway, and Lady Florence
was again on his arm. At the same time she became conscious of a morsel
of chaperons' conversation such as, by the kind contrivances of fate, a
girl is tolerably sure to hear under similar circumstances.

The _debutante's_ good looks, Hugh Flaxman's apparent susceptibility to
them, the possibility of results, and the satisfactory disposition of
the family goods and chattels that would be brought about by such a
match, the opportunity it would offer the man, too, of rehabilitating
himself socially after his first matrimonial escapade--Rose caught
fragments of all these topics as they were discussed by two old ladies,
presumably also of the family 'ring,' who gossiped behind her with more
gusto than discretion. Highmindedness, of course, told her to move away;
something else held her fast, till her partner came up for her.

Then she floated away into the whirlwind of waltzers. But as she moved
round the room on her partner's arm, her delicate half-scornful grace
attracting look after look, the soul within was all aflame--aflame
against the serried ranks and phalanxes of this unfamiliar, hostile
world! She had just been reading Trevelyan's _Life of Fox_ aloud to her
mother, who liked occasionally to flavour her knitting with literature,
and she began now to revolve a passage from it, describing the upper
class of the last century, which had struck that morning on her quick
retentive memory: '"_A few thousand people who thought that the world
was made for them_"--did it not run so?--"_and that all outside their
own fraternity were unworthy of notice or criticism, bestowed upon each
other an amount of attention quite inconceivable.... Within the charmed
precincts there prevailed an easy and natural mode of intercourse, in
some respects singularly delightful._" Such, for instance, as the