then he found that the sovereign rebelled against the mayor of
the palace and had to be allowed his way.

But the sovereign was nursing no seeds of the kind of discontent which
Steptoe was afraid of. As a matter of fact he was thinking of the way
in which Letty had left the room. The perspective, the tea-gown, the
effectively dressed hair, enabled him to perceive the combination of
results which Madame Simone had called _de l'elegance naturelle_. She
had that; he could see it as he hadn't seen it hitherto. It must have
given what value there was to her poor little roles in motion
pictures. Now that his eye had caught it, it surprised, and to some
degree disturbed, him. It was more than the show-girl's inane
prettiness, or the comely wax-work face of the girl on the cover of a
magazine. With due allowance for her Anglo-Saxonism and honesty, she
was the type of woman to whom "things happen." Things would happen to
her, Allerton surmised, beyond anything she could experience in his
cumbrous and antiquated house. This queer episode would drop behind
her as an episode and no more, and in the multitude of future
incidents she would almost forget that she had known him. He hoped to
God that it would be so, and yet....

He was noting too that she hadn't taxed him, in the way of calling on
his small supply of nervous energy. Rather she had spared it, and he
felt himself rested. After a talk with Barbara he was always spent.
Her emotional furies demanded so much of him that they used him up.
This girl, on the contrary, was soothing. He didn't know how she was
soothing; but she was. He couldn't remember when he had talked to a
woman with so little thought of what he was to say and how he was to
say it, and heaven only knew that the things to be said between them
were nerve-racking enough. But they had come out of their own accord,
those nerve-racking things, probably, he reasoned, because she was a
girl of inferior class with whom he didn't have to be particular.

She was quick, too, to catch the difference between his speech and her
own. She was quick--and pathetic. Her self-correction amused him, with
a strain of pity in his amusement. If a girl like that had only had a
chance.... And just then Steptoe broke in on his musing by entering
the room.

The first subject to be aired was that of the changes in the household
staff, and Steptoe raised it diplomatically. Mrs. Courage and Jane had
taken offense at the young lydy's pre