."

"What--by my mother's wish?"

"I was given to understand that I had carte blanche in visiting
matters."

"You did not ask her consent?"

"I saw no occasion."

"You did not?"

"No."

"Then, Cecil, I must say that whatever you may have to complain of,
you have committed a grave act of disrespect."

"I was told that I was free to arrange these things!"

"Free!" said Raymond, thoroughly roused; "free to write notes, and
order the carriage, and play lady of the house; but did you think
that made you free to bring an American mountebank of a woman to
hold forth absurd trash in my mother's own drawing-room, as soon as
my back was turned?"

"I should have done the same had you been there."

"Indeed!" ironically; "I did not know how far you had graduated in
the Rights of Women. So you invited these people?"

"Then the whole host of children was poured in on us, and everything
imaginable done to interrupt, and render everything rational
impossible. I know it was Rosamond's contrivance, she looked so
triumphant, dressed in an absurd fancy dress, and her whole train
doing nothing but turning me into ridicule, and Mrs. Tallboys too.
Whatever you choose to call her, you cannot approve of a stranger
and foreigner being insulted here. It is that about which I care--
not myself; I have seen none of them since, nor shall I do so until
a full apology has been made to my guest and to myself."

"You have not told me the offence."

"In the first place, there was an absurd form of Christmas-tree, to
which one was dragged blindfold, and sedulously made ridiculous; and
I--I had a dust-pan and brush. Yes, I had, in mockery of our
endeavours to purify that unhappy street."

"I should have taken it as a little harmless fun," said Raymond.
"Depend on it, it was so intended."

"What, when Mrs. Tallboys had a padlock and key? I see you are
determined to laugh at it all. Most likely they consulted you
beforehand."

"Cecil, I cannot have you talk such nonsense. Is this all you have
to complain of?"

"No. There was a charade on the word Blockhead, where your brother
Charles and the two De Lanceys caricatured what they supposed to be
Mrs. Tallboys' doctrines."

"How did she receive it?"

"Most good-humouredly; but that made it no better on their part."

"Are you sure it was not a mere ordinary piece of pleasantry, with
perhaps a spice of personality, but nothing worth resenting?"

"You did not see it. Or perha