“She is a pretty girl,” he said with the imbecility of a man who ought to speak and who has nothing to say, also who has something that he does not wish to say.

“She is better than pretty—­she is good,” returned Mrs. Harrowby; and Edgar, not caring to discuss Adelaide on closer ground with his mother, strolled away into his private room, where he sat before the fire smoking, meditating on his life in the past and his prospects in the future, and wondering how he would like it when he had finally abjured the freedom of bachelorhood and had taken up with matrimony and squiredom for the remainder of his natural life.

Punctually at seven Adelaide Birkett appeared.  This, too, was one of her minor virtues:  she was exact.  Mind, person, habits, all were regulated with the nicest method, and she knew as little of hurry as of delay, and as little of both as of passion.

“You are such a dear, good punctual girl!” said Josephine affectionately—­Josephine, whose virtues had a few more, loose ends and knots untied than had her friend’s.

“It is so vulgar to be unpunctual,” said Adelaide with her calm good-breeding.  “It seems to me only another form of uncleanliness and disorder.”

“And Edgar is so punctual too!” cried Josephine by way of commentary.

Adelaide smiled, not broadly, not hilariously, only to the exact shade demanded by conversational sympathy.  “Then we shall agree in this,” she said quietly.

“Oh I am sure you will agree, and in more than this,” Josephine returned, almost with enthusiasm.

Had she not been the willing nurse of this affair from the beginning?—­if not the open confidante, yet secretly holding the key to her younger friend’s mind and actions? and was she not, like all the kindly disappointed, intensely sympathetic with love-matters, whether wise or foolish, hopeful or hopeless?

“Who is it that you are sure will agree with Miss Adelaide, if any one indeed could be found to disagree with her?” asked Edgar, standing in the doorway.

Josephine laughed with the silliness of a weak woman “caught.”  She looked at Adelaide slyly.  Adelaide turned her quiet face, unflushed, unruffled, and neither laughed sillily nor looked slyly.

“She was praising me for punctuality; and then she said that you were punctual too,” she explained cheerfully.

“We learn that in the army,” said Edgar.

“But I have had to learn it without the army,” she answered.

“Which shows that you have by the grace of nature what I have attained only by discipline and art,” said Edgar gallantly.

Adelaide smiled.  She did not disdain the compliment.  On the contrary, she wished to impress it on Edgar that she accepted his praises because they were her due.  She knew that the world takes us if not quite at our own valuation, yet as being the character we assume to be.  It all depends on our choice of a mask and to what ideal self we dress.  If we are clever and dress in keeping, without showing chinks or discrepancies, no one will find out that it is only a mask; and those of us are most successful in gaining the good-will of our fellows who understand this principle the most clearly and act on it the most consistently.