ct moment a funny thing happened. The _passee_ elderly young
lady vanished--she who had been so often weighed, found wanting, and
been put back in the balance for reconsideration. She vanished, and a
desirable _alter ego_--Mr. Pellew's, as he hoped--was looking across at
him from the sofa by the window, swinging the tassel of the red blind
that kept the sun in check, and hushed it down to a fiery glow on the
sofa's occupant waiting to know how old he was.

"I thought I had told you. Nearly forty-six."

"Very well, then! My father is five-and-twenty years your senior."

"If you had to say exactly _why_ you dislike your father's having
married again, do you think you could?"

"Oh dear, no! I'm quite sure I couldn't. But I think it detestable for
all that."

"I'm not sure that you're right. You may be, though! Are you sure it
hasn't something to do with the ... with the party he's married?"

"Not at all sure." Dryly.

"Can't understand objecting to a match on its own account. It's always
something to do with the outsider that comes in--the one one knows least
of."

"You wouldn't like this one." It may seem inexplicable, that these words
should be the cause of the person addressed taking the nearest chair to
the speaker, having previously been a nomad with his thumbs in the
armholes of his waistcoat. Close analysis may connect the action with an
extension of the family-friendship wardrobe, which it may have
recognised--a neckcloth, perhaps--and may be able to explain why it
seemed doubtful form to the Hon. Percival to keep his thumbs in those
waistcoat-loops. To us, it is perfectly easy to understand--without any
analysis at all--why, at this juncture, Miss Dickenson said:--"I suppose
you know you may smoke a cigarette, if you like?"

In those days you might have looked in tobacconist's shopwindows all day
and never seen a cigarette. It was a foreign fashion at which sound
smokers looked askance. Mossoos might smoke it, but good, solid John
Bull suspected it of being a kick-shaw not unconnected with Atheism. He
stuck to his pipe chiefly. Nevertheless, it was always open to skill to
fabricate its own cigarettes, and Mr. Pellew's aptitude in the art was
known to Miss Dickenson. The one he screwed up on receipt of this
licence was epoch-making. The interview had been one that was going to
last a quarter of an hour. This cigarette made its duration
indeterminate. Because a cigarette is not a cigar. The latter is like