n," he said to his wife.

But the differences remained uneffaced, if not uneffaceable, between
the Coreys and Tom Corey's wife. "If he had only married the Colonel!"
subtly suggested Nanny Corey.

There was a brief season of civility and forbearance on both sides,
when he brought her home before starting for Mexico, and her
father-in-law made a sympathetic feint of liking Penelope's way of
talking, but it is questionable if even he found it so delightful as
her husband did. Lily Corey made a little, ineffectual sketch of her,
which she put by with other studies to finish up, sometime, and found
her rather picturesque in some ways. Nanny got on with her better than
the rest, and saw possibilities for her in the country to which she was
going. "As she's quite unformed, socially," she explained to her
mother, "there is a chance that she will form herself on the Spanish
manner, if she stays there long enough, and that when she comes back
she will have the charm of, not olives, perhaps, but tortillas,
whatever they are: something strange and foreign, even if it's
borrowed. I'm glad she's going to Mexico. At that distance we
can--correspond."

Her mother sighed, and said bravely that she was sure they all got on
very pleasantly as it was, and that she was perfectly satisfied if Tom
was.

There was, in fact, much truth in what she said of their harmony with
Penelope. Having resolved, from the beginning, to make the best of the
worst, it might almost be said that they were supported and consoled in
their good intentions by a higher power. This marriage had not, thanks
to an over-ruling Providence, brought the succession of Lapham teas
upon Bromfield Corey which he had dreaded; the Laphams were far off in
their native fastnesses, and neither Lily nor Nanny Corey was obliged
to sacrifice herself to the conversation of Irene; they were not even
called upon to make a social demonstration for Penelope at a time when,
most people being still out of town, it would have been so easy; she
and Tom had both begged that there might be nothing of that kind; and
though none of the Coreys learned to know her very well in the week she
spent with them, they did not find it hard to get on with her. There
were even moments when Nanny Corey, like her father, had glimpses of
what Tom had called her humour, but it was perhaps too unlike their own
to be easily recognisable.

Whether Penelope, on her side, found it more difficult to har