otic
friendships, which are really diseased love-affairs, with another
girl or a teacher, and the Wiltons' reason was a pecuniary one. Among
the Wiltons' few assets was a distant female relative of pronounced
accomplishments and educational attainments, who was even worse off
financially than they. It had become with her a question of
bread-and-butter and the simplest necessaries of life, whereas Mrs.
Wilton and her sister, Miss Pamela, still owned the old family
mansion, which, although reduced from its former heights of fashion,
was grand, with a subdued and dim grandeur, it is true, but still
grand; and there was also a fine old country-house in a fashionable
summer resort. There were also old servants and jewels and laces and
all that had been. The difficulty was in retaining it with the
addition of repairs, and additions which are as essential to the mere
existence of inanimate objects as food is to the animate, these being
as their law of growth. Rose Fletcher's advent, although her fortune
was, after all, only a moderate one, permitted such homely but
necessary things as shingles to be kept intact upon roofs of old
family homes; it enabled servants to be paid and fuel and food to be
provided. Still, after all, had poor Eliza Farrel, that morbid victim
of her own hunger for love, known what economies were practised at
her expense, in order that all this should be maintained, she would
have rebelled. She knew that the impecunious female relative was a
person fully adequate to educate Rose, but she did not know that her
only stipend therefor was her bread-and-butter and the cast-off
raiment of Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela. She did not know that when
Rose came out her stock of party gowns was so limited that she had to
refuse many invitations or appear always as the same flower, as far
as garments were concerned. She did not know that during Rose's two
trips abroad the expenses had been so carefully calculated that the
girl had not received those advantages usually supposed to be derived
from foreign travel.

While Mrs. Wilton and Miss Pamela would have scorned the imputation
of deceit or dishonesty, their moral sense in those two directions
was blunted by their keen scent for the conventionalities of life,
which to them had almost become a religion. They had never owned to
their inmost consciousness that Rose had not derived the fullest
benefit from Miss Farrel's money; it is doubtful if they really were
capable of