of the profound philosopher who has
learned to accept most things as strange and all things as
inexplicable--'It is an extraordinary thing the way all your
possessions disappear. You try having duplicates, but, you know, Miss
Abingdon, that's not a bit of use. The first man who comes along helps
himself just because you 've two of a thing, so you 're not a bit
better off than you were before, are you?'

The young man turned his blue eyes with their long lashes on Miss
Abingdon with a look of mute inquiry, and threw one arm in its striped
pyjama suit up on the pillow.

Miss Abingdon told herself that she was an old woman, and suggested,
with outward boldness but with inward diffidence, that Sir Nigel
required a wife to look after him.

The young man smiled gratefully at her. 'I think so too,' he said
simply; 'but then, you see, she won't have me.'

They were all so amazingly frank! Jane's friend, Kitty Sherard, the
girl who smoked cigarettes in her bedroom, had actually told a funny
story one day about a flirtation of her father's, and had made
everybody except Miss Abingdon laugh at it.

'Perhaps,' she said, 'the lady may change her mind.'

'I don't think she will,' said Toffy slowly. 'You see, she's married
already.'

Miss Abingdon did not discuss such subjects. She glanced at her
key-basket and moved uneasily in her chair.

'I 'm going to revise the marriage service when I 'm in power,' said
the gentle, lagging voice from under the heavy canopy of old-fashioned
chintz with which Miss Abingdon, who disapproved of draughts, hung all
the beds in her house. 'You see, it's like this,' he went on; 'girls,
when they are about eighteen or twenty, would generally like to improve
on their parents a bit, and to have meals at different hours to those
which they have grown tired of in their own homes; also, they have an
idea that if they haven't a romance some time or other they will be
rather out of it, don't you know, so they say "yes" to some fellow who
proposes to them--you have done it yourself hundreds of times, I dare
say, Miss Abingdon--but if you haven't the luck to get out of it, you
are jolly well tied for the term of your natural life.'

'There are some very sad cases, of course,' said Miss Abingdon, drawing
down her upper lip.

'And it's so often the good ones,' said Toffy, from the depths of his
profound experience of life, 'who have the hardest lines. And that
makes it all the more unfair, does