d cat disport
themselves in safety. I am sure you must have brought a dog or a cat
with you, Miss Campion. I never yet knew a young woman from the country
who did not bring a pet animal to town with her."

"Jim, you are very rude," said his wife.

"I shall have to plead guilty," Lettice answered, smiling a little. "I
have left my fair Persian, Fluff, in the care of my maid, Milly, who is
to bring her to London as soon as I can get into my new home."

"Fluff," said Clara, meditatively, "is the creature with a tail as big
as your arm, and a ruff round her neck, and Milly is the pretty little
housemaid; I remember and approve of them both."

The subject of the new house served them until they went upstairs into
Clara's bright little drawing-room, which Graham used to speak of
disrespectfully as his wife's doll's house. It was crowded with pretty
but inexpensive knick-knacks, the profusion of which was rather
bewildering to Lettice, with her more simple tastes. Of one thing she
was quite sure, that she would not, when she furnished her own rooms,
expend much money in droves of delicately-colored china pigs and
elephants, which happened to be in fashion at the time. She also doubted
the expediency of tying up two peacocks' feathers with a yellow ribbon,
and hanging them in solitary glory on the wall flanked by plates of Kaga
ware, at tenpence-halfpenny a-piece. Lettice's taste had been formed by
her father, and was somewhat masculine in its simplicity, and she cared
only for the finer kinds of art, whether in porcelain or painting. But
she was fain to confess that the effect of Clara's decorations was very
pretty, and she wondered at the care and pains which had evidently been
spent on the arrangement of Mrs. Graham's "Liberty rags" and Oriental
ware. When the soft yellow silk curtains were drawn, and a subdued light
fell through the jewelled facets of an Eastern lamp upon the peacock
fans and richly-toned Syrian rugs, and all the other hackneyed
ornamentation by which "artistic" taste is supposed to be shown, Lettice
could not but acknowledge that the room was charming. But her thoughts
flew back instantly to the old study at home, with its solid oak
furniture, its cushioned window-seats, its unfashionable curtains of red
moreen; and in the faint sickness of that memory, it seemed to her that
she could be more comfortable at a deal table, with a kitchen chair set
upon unpolished boards, than in the midst of Clara's prett