e subject if I dared to do so here, but I am bound now to confine
myself to Miss Vavasor's room. The monstrous deformity of which I
have spoken was not known when that house in Queen Anne Street was
built. There is to be found no such abomination of shape in the
buildings of our ancestors,--not even in the days of George the
Second. But yet the drawing-room of which I speak was ugly, and Alice
knew that it was so. She knew that it was ugly, and she would greatly
have liked to banish the green sofa, to have re-papered the wall, and
to have hung up curtains with a dash of pink through them. With the
green carpet she would have been contented. But her father was an
extravagant man; and from the day on which she had come of age she
had determined that it was her special duty to avoid extravagance.

"It's the ugliest room I ever saw in my life," her father once said
to her.

"It is not very pretty," Alice replied.

"I'll go halves with you in the expense of redoing it," said Mr
Vavasor.

"Wouldn't that be extravagant, papa? The things have not been here
quite four years yet."

Then Mr Vavasor had shrugged his shoulders and said nothing more
about it. It was little to him whether the drawing-room in Queen
Anne Street was ugly or pretty. He was on the committee of his club,
and he took care that the furniture there should be in all respects
comfortable.

It was now June; and that month Lady Macleod was in the habit of
spending among her noble relatives in London when she had succeeded
in making both ends so far overlap each other at Cheltenham as to
give her the fifty pounds necessary for this purpose. For though she
spent her month in London among her noble friends, it must not be
supposed that her noble friends gave her bed or board. They sometimes
gave her tea, such as it was, and once or twice in the month they
gave the old lady a second-rate dinner. On these occasions she
hired a little parlour and bedroom behind it in King Street, Saint
James's, and lived a hot, uncomfortable life, going about at nights
to gatherings of fashionable people of which she in her heart
disapproved, seeking for smiles which seldom came to her, and which
she excused herself for desiring because they were the smiles of her
kith and her kin, telling herself always that she made this vain
journey to the modern Babylon for the good of Alice Vavasor, and
telling herself as often that she now made it for the last time. On
the occasion of her