e.

'Yes, sometimes--but they don't come back together.'

'Do you mean they quarrel on the way?'

'I don't know what they do, Lady Davenant--I don't understand,' Laura
Wing replied, with an unguarded tremor in her voice. 'I don't think they
are very happy.'

'Then they ought to be ashamed of themselves. They have got everything
so comfortable--what more do they want?'

'Yes, and the children are such dears!'

'Certainly--charming. And is she a good person, the present governess?
Does she look after them properly?'

'Yes--she seems very good--it's a blessing. But I think she's unhappy
too.'

'Bless us, what a house! Does she want some one to make love to her?'

'No, but she wants Selina to see--to appreciate,' said the young girl.

'And doesn't she appreciate--when she leaves them that way quite to the
young woman?'

'Miss Steet thinks she doesn't notice how they come on--she is never
there.'

'And has she wept and told you so? You know they are always crying,
governesses--whatever line you take. You shouldn't draw them out too
much--they are always looking for a chance. She ought to be thankful to
be let alone. You mustn't be too sympathetic--it's mostly wasted,' the
old lady went on.

'Oh, I'm not--I assure you I'm not,' said Laura Wing. 'On the contrary,
I see so much about me that I don't sympathise with.'

'Well, you mustn't be an impertinent little American either!' her
interlocutress exclaimed. Laura sat with her for half an hour and the
conversation took a turn through the affairs of Plash and through Lady
Davenant's own, which were visits in prospect and ideas suggested more
or less directly by them as well as by the books she had been reading, a
heterogeneous pile on a table near her, all of them new and clean, from
a circulating library in London. The old woman had ideas and Laura liked
them, though they often struck her as very sharp and hard, because at
Mellows she had no diet of that sort. There had never been an idea in
the house, since she came at least, and there was wonderfully little
reading. Lady Davenant still went from country-house to country-house
all winter, as she had done all her life, and when Laura asked her she
told her the places and the people she probably should find at each of
them. Such an enumeration was much less interesting to the girl than it
would have been a year before: she herself had now seen a great many
places and people and the freshness of her curiosity wa