to lump it as respectably as
possible."

"I am _so_ sorry for them," said Emily.

"Of course you are. And you will probably show them all sorts of
indiscreet kindnesses, but don't be too altruistic, my good Emily. The
man is odious, and the girl looks like a native beauty. She rather
frightens me."

"I don't think Captain Osborn is odious," Emily answered. "And she _is_
pretty, you know. She is frightened of us, really."

Remembering days when she herself had been at a disadvantage with people
who were fortunate enough to be of importance, and recalling what her
secret tremor before them had been, Emily was very nice indeed to little
Mrs. Osborn. She knew from experience things which would be of use to
her--things about lodgings and things about shops. Osborn had taken
lodgings in Duke Street, and Emily knew the quarter thoroughly.
Walderhurst watched her being nice, through his fixed eyeglass, and he
decided that she had really a very good manner. Its goodness consisted
largely in its directness. While she never brought forth unnecessarily
recollections of the days when she had done other people's shopping and
had purchased for herself articles at sales marked 11-3/4_d_, she was
interestingly free from any embarrassment in connection with the facts.
Walderhurst, who had been much bored by himself and other people in time
past, actually found that it gave a fillip to existence to look on at a
woman who, having been one of the hardest worked of the genteel
labouring classes, was adapting herself to the role of marchioness by
the simplest of processes, and making a very nice figure at it too, in
her entirely unbrilliant way. If she had been an immensely clever woman,
there would have been nothing special in it. She was not clever at all,
yet Walderhurst had seen her produce effects such as a clever woman
might have laboured for and only attained by a stroke of genius. As, for
instance, when she had met for the first time after her engagement, a
certain particularly detestable woman of rank, to whom her relation to
Walderhurst was peculiarly bitter. The Duchess of Merwold had counted
the Marquis as her own, considering him fitted by nature to be the
spouse of her eldest girl, a fine young woman with projecting teeth, who
had hung fire. She felt Emily Fox-Seton's incomprehensible success to be
a piece of impudent presumption, and she had no reason to restrain the
expression of her sentiments so long as she conveyed the