t, papa. I am Number 46 in the Exhibition of the Gallery of
Painters in Water-colours."

"My love, what do you mean?" says mamma; and Lady Kew, jumping up on her
crooked stick with immense agility, tore the card out of Ethel's bosom,
and very likely would have boxed her ears, but that her parents were
present and Lord Kew announced.

Ethel talked about pictures the whole evening, and would talk of nothing
else. Grandmamma went away furious. "She told Barnes, and when everybody
was gone there was a pretty row in the building," said Madam Ethel, with
an arch look, when she narrated the story. "Barnes was ready to kill
me and eat me; but I never was afraid of Barnes." And the biographer
gathers from this little anecdote, narrated to him, never mind by whom,
at a long subsequent period, that there had been great disputes in Sir
Brian Newcome's establishment, fierce drawing-room battles, whereof
certain pictures of a certain painter might have furnished the cause,
and in which Miss Newcome had the whole of the family forces against
her. That such battles take place in other domestic establishments,
who shall say or shall not say? Who, when he goes out to dinner, and
is received by a bland host with a gay shake of the hand, and a pretty
hostess with a gracious smile of welcome, dares to think that Mr.
Johnson upstairs, half an hour before, was swearing out of his
dressing-room at Mrs. Johnson, for having ordered a turbot instead of a
salmon, or that Mrs. Johnson now talking to Lady Jones so nicely about
their mutual darling children, was crying her eyes out as her maid
was fastening her gown, as the carriages were actually driving up? The
servants know these things, but not we in the dining-room. Hark with
what a respectful tone Johnson begs the clergyman present to say grace!

Whatever these family quarrels may have been, let bygones be bygones,
and let us be perfectly sure, that to whatever purpose Miss Ethel
Newcome, for good or for evil, might make her mind up, she had quite
spirit enough to hold her own. She chose to be Countess of Kew because
she chose to be Countess of Kew; had she set her heart on marrying Mr.
Kuhn, she would have had her way, and made the family adopt it, and
called him dear Fritz, as by his godfathers and godmothers, in his
baptism, Mr. Kuhn was called. Clive was but a fancy, if he had even been
so much as that, not a passion, and she fancied a pretty four-pronged
coronet still more.

So that th