“Well, and why not?  We really didn’t have the picking and choosing of our mothers or fathers, though Lucy always behaves as though we had—­to the fourth generation.  Besides, I always took the side of that poor creature, and Lucy believed the worst—­as usual.  Well, and so she’s going to make Oliver back out of it?”

At this point the door opened, and Lady Lucy glided in, clad in a frail majesty which would have overawed any one but Elizabeth Niton.  Alicia discreetly disappeared, and Lady Niton, after an inquiry as to her friend’s health—­delivered, as it were, at the point of the bayonet, and followed by a flying remark on the absurdity of treating your body as if it were only given you to be harried—­plunged headlong into the great topic.  What an amazing business!  Now at last one would see what Oliver was made of!

Lady Lucy summoned all her dignity, expounded her view, and entirely declined to be laughed or rated out of it.  For Elizabeth Niton, her wig much awry, her old eyes and cheeks blazing, took up the cause of Diana with alternate sarcasm and eloquence.  As for the social disrepute—­stuff!  All that was wanting to such a beautiful creature as Diana Mallory was a story and a scandal.  Positively she would be the rage, and Oliver’s fortune was made.

Lady Lucy sat in pale endurance, throwing in an occasional protest, not budging by one inch—­and no doubt reminding herself from time to time, in the intervals of her old friend’s attacks, of the letter she had just despatched to Beechcote—­until, at last, Lady Niton, having worked herself up into a fine frenzy to no purpose at all, thought it was time to depart.

“Well, my dear,” she said, leaning on her stick, the queerest rag-bag of a figure—­crooked wig, rusty black dress, and an unspeakable bonnet—­“you are a saint, of course, and I am a quarrelsome old sinner; I like society, and you, I believe, regard it as a grove of barren fig-trees.  I don’t care a rap for my neighbor if he doesn’t amuse me, and you live in a puddle of good works.  But, upon my word, I wouldn’t be you when it comes to the sheep and the goats business!  Here is a young girl, sweet and good and beautifully brought up—­money and manners and everything handsome about her—­she is in love with Oliver, and he with her—­and just because you happen to find out that she is the daughter of a poor creature who made a tragic mess of her life, and suffered for it infinitely more than you and I are ever likely to suffer for our intolerably respectable peccadilloes—­you will break her heart and his—­if he’s the good-luck to have one!—­and there you sit, looking like a suffering angel, and expecting all your old friends, I suppose, to pity and admire you.  Well, I won’t, Lucy!—­I won’t!  That’s flat.  There’s my hand.  Good-bye!”

Lady Lucy took it patiently, though from no other person in the world save Elizabeth Niton would she have so taken it.

“I thought, Elizabeth, you would have tried to understand me.”