n. Laura remained with her for an hour, and
before they separated the culpable woman had taken a tremendous
vow--kneeling before her sister with her head in her lap--never again,
as long as she lived, to consent to see Captain Crispin or to address a
word to him, spoken or written. The girl went terribly tired to bed.

A month afterwards she lunched with Lady Davenant, whom she had not seen
since the day she took Mr. Wendover to call upon her. The old woman had
found herself obliged to entertain a small company, and as she disliked
set parties she sent Laura a request for sympathy and assistance. She
had disencumbered herself, at the end of so many years, of the burden of
hospitality; but every now and then she invited people, in order to
prove that she was not too old. Laura suspected her of choosing stupid
ones on purpose to prove it better--to show that she could submit not
only to the extraordinary but, what was much more difficult, to the
usual. But when they had been properly fed she encouraged them to
disperse; on this occasion as the party broke up Laura was the only
person she asked to stay. She wished to know in the first place why she
had not been to see her for so long, and in the second how that young
man had behaved--the one she had brought that Sunday. Lady Davenant
didn't remember his name, though he had been so good-natured, as she
said, since then, as to leave a card. If he had behaved well that was a
very good reason for the girl's neglect and Laura need give no other.
Laura herself would not have behaved well if at such a time she had been
running after old women. There was nothing, in general, that the girl
liked less than being spoken of, off-hand, as a marriageable
article--being planned and arranged for in this particular. It made too
light of her independence, and though in general such inventions passed
for benevolence they had always seemed to her to contain at bottom an
impertinence--as if people could be moved about like a game of chequers.
There was a liberty in the way Lady Davenant's imagination disposed of
her (with such an _insouciance_ of her own preferences), but she forgave
that, because after all this old friend was not obliged to think of her
at all.

'I knew that you were almost always out of town now, on Sundays--and so
have we been,' Laura said. 'And then I have been a great deal with my
sister--more than before.'

'More than before what?'

'Well, a kind of estrangement we h