am's jolly good."

George, looking big and dishevelled, was pacing up and down the
dining-room. As she entered he stopped, and said:

"No--nothing to eat."

"You go down to the others," said Lucy; "Charlotte and I will give Mr.
Emerson all he wants. Where's mother?"

"She's started on her Sunday writing. She's in the drawing-room."

"That's all right. You go away."

He went off singing.

Lucy sat down at the table. Miss Bartlett, who was thoroughly
frightened, took up a book and pretended to read.

She would not be drawn into an elaborate speech. She just said: "I can't
have it, Mr. Emerson. I cannot even talk to you. Go out of this house,
and never come into it again as long as I live here--" flushing as she
spoke and pointing to the door. "I hate a row. Go please."

"What--"

"No discussion."

"But I can't--"

She shook her head. "Go, please. I do not want to call in Mr. Vyse."

"You don't mean," he said, absolutely ignoring Miss Bartlett--"you don't
mean that you are going to marry that man?"

The line was unexpected.

She shrugged her shoulders, as if his vulgarity wearied her. "You are
merely ridiculous," she said quietly.

Then his words rose gravely over hers: "You cannot live with Vyse. He's
only for an acquaintance. He is for society and cultivated talk. He
should know no one intimately, least of all a woman."

It was a new light on Cecil's character.

"Have you ever talked to Vyse without feeling tired?"

"I can scarcely discuss--"

"No, but have you ever? He is the sort who are all right so long as
they keep to things--books, pictures--but kill when they come to
people. That's why I'll speak out through all this muddle even now. It's
shocking enough to lose you in any case, but generally a man must
deny himself joy, and I would have held back if your Cecil had been a
different person. I would never have let myself go. But I saw him first
in the National Gallery, when he winced because my father mispronounced
the names of great painters. Then he brings us here, and we find it
is to play some silly trick on a kind neighbour. That is the man all
over--playing tricks on people, on the most sacred form of life that
he can find. Next, I meet you together, and find him protecting and
teaching you and your mother to be shocked, when it was for YOU to
settle whether you were shocked or no. Cecil all over again. He daren't
let a woman decide. He's the type who's kept Europe back for a thousand