.
"The worse things are, let me just mention to you about that, the better
they seem positively to be for one's feeling up in the language. They're
more difficult, the bad ones--and there's a lot in that. All the young
men know it--those who are going up for exams."

She had her eyes for a little on Lord Petherton and her husband; then
as if she had not heard what her interlocutor had just said she overcame
her last scruple. "Dear Mitchy, has he had money from you?"

He stared with his good goggle eyes--he laughed out. "Why on earth--?
But do you suppose I'd tell you if he had?"

"He hasn't really borrowed the most dreadful sums?"

Mitchy was highly diverted. "Why should he? For what, please?"

"That's just it--for what? What does he do with it all? What in the
world becomes of it?"

"Well," Mitchy suggested, "he's saving up to start a business. Harold's
irreproachable--hasn't a vice. Who knows in these days what may happen?
He sees further than any young man I know. Do let him save."

She looked far away with her sweet world-weariness. "If you weren't
an angel it would be a horror to be talking to you. But I insist on
knowing." She insisted now with her absurdly pathetic eyes on him. "What
kind of sums?"

"You shall never, never find out--not if you were never to speak to me
again," Mr. Mitchett replied with extravagant firmness. "Harold's one of
my great amusements--I really have awfully few; and if you deprive me of
him you'll be a fiend. There are only one or two things I want to live
for, but one of them is to see how far Harold will go. Please give me
some more tea."

"Do you positively swear?" she asked with intensity as she helped him.
Then without waiting for his answer: "You have the common charity to US,
I suppose, to see the position you'd put us in. Fancy Edward!" she quite
austerely threw off.

Mr. Mitchett, at this, had on his side a wonder. "Does Edward
imagine--?"

"My dear man, Edward never 'imagined' anything in life." She still had
her eyes on him. "Therefore if he SEES a thing, don't you know? it must
exist."

Mitchy for a little fixed the person mentioned as he sat with his other
guest, but whatever this person saw he failed just then to see his
wife's companion, whose eyes he never met. His face only offered itself
after the fashion of a clean domestic vessel, a receptacle with the
peculiar property of constantly serving yet never filling, to Lord
Petherton's talkative splash. "Wel