on sat speechless for
a while. She took a fan out of her large reticule and fanned herself, a
proceeding by which she often protested against the temperature at which
Lady Lucy kept her drawing-room. She then asked for a window to be
opened, and when she had been sufficiently oxygenated she
delivered herself:

"Well, and why not? We really didn't have the picking and choosing of
our mothers or fathers, though Lucy always behaves as though we had--to
the fourth generation. Besides, I always took the side of that poor
creature, and Lucy believed the worst--as usual. Well, and so she's
going to make Oliver back out of it?"

At this point the door opened, and Lady Lucy glided in, clad in a frail
majesty which would have overawed any one but Elizabeth Niton. Alicia
discreetly disappeared, and Lady Niton, after an inquiry as to her
friend's health--delivered, as it were, at the point of the bayonet, and
followed by a flying remark on the absurdity of treating your body as if
it were only given you to be harried--plunged headlong into the great
topic. What an amazing business! Now at last one would see what Oliver
was made of!

Lady Lucy summoned all her dignity, expounded her view, and entirely
declined to be laughed or rated out of it. For Elizabeth Niton, her wig
much awry, her old eyes and cheeks blazing, took up the cause of Diana
with alternate sarcasm and eloquence. As for the social
disrepute--stuff! All that was wanting to such a beautiful creature as
Diana Mallory was a story and a scandal. Positively she would be the
rage, and Oliver's fortune was made.

Lady Lucy sat in pale endurance, throwing in an occasional protest, not
budging by one inch--and no doubt reminding herself from time to time,
in the intervals of her old friend's attacks, of the letter she had just
despatched to Beechcote--until, at last, Lady Niton, having worked
herself up into a fine frenzy to no purpose at all, thought it was time
to depart.

"Well, my dear," she said, leaning on her stick, the queerest rag-bag of
a figure--crooked wig, rusty black dress, and an unspeakable
bonnet--"you are a saint, of course, and I am a quarrelsome old sinner;
I like society, and you, I believe, regard it as a grove of barren
fig-trees. I don't care a rap for my neighbor if he doesn't amuse me,
and you live in a puddle of good works. But, upon my word, I wouldn't be
you when it comes to the sheep and the goats business! Here is a young
girl, sweet and g