er of the family poured in a drop of oil. Cecil despised
their methods--perhaps rightly. At all events, they were not his own.

Dinner was at half-past seven. Freddy gabbled the grace, and they drew
up their heavy chairs and fell to. Fortunately, the men were hungry.
Nothing untoward occurred until the pudding. Then Freddy said:

"Lucy, what's Emerson like?"

"I saw him in Florence," said Lucy, hoping that this would pass for a
reply.

"Is he the clever sort, or is he a decent chap?"

"Ask Cecil; it is Cecil who brought him here."

"He is the clever sort, like myself," said Cecil.

Freddy looked at him doubtfully.

"How well did you know them at the Bertolini?" asked Mrs. Honeychurch.

"Oh, very slightly. I mean, Charlotte knew them even less than I did."

"Oh, that reminds me--you never told me what Charlotte said in her
letter."

"One thing and another," said Lucy, wondering whether she would get
through the meal without a lie. "Among other things, that an awful
friend of hers had been bicycling through Summer Street, wondered if
she'd come up and see us, and mercifully didn't."

"Lucy, I do call the way you talk unkind."

"She was a novelist," said Lucy craftily. The remark was a happy one,
for nothing roused Mrs. Honeychurch so much as literature in the hands
of females. She would abandon every topic to inveigh against those women
who (instead of minding their houses and their children) seek notoriety
by print. Her attitude was: "If books must be written, let them be
written by men"; and she developed it at great length, while Cecil
yawned and Freddy played at "This year, next year, now, never," with his
plum-stones, and Lucy artfully fed the flames of her mother's wrath. But
soon the conflagration died down, and the ghosts began to gather in the
darkness. There were too many ghosts about. The original ghost--that
touch of lips on her cheek--had surely been laid long ago; it could be
nothing to her that a man had kissed her on a mountain once. But it
had begotten a spectral family--Mr. Harris, Miss Bartlett's letter,
Mr. Beebe's memories of violets--and one or other of these was bound to
haunt her before Cecil's very eyes. It was Miss Bartlett who returned
now, and with appalling vividness.

"I have been thinking, Lucy, of that letter of Charlotte's. How is she?"

"I tore the thing up."

"Didn't she say how she was? How does she sound? Cheerful?"

"Oh, yes I suppose so--no--not very cheerful, I s