“Not at all—­not at all!” cried Lady Niton.  “There were black sheep then; and there are black sheep now.”

Lady Lucy held her own.

“I am sure that people take less care in their invitations,” she said, with soft obstinacy.  “I have often heard my mother speak of society in her young days,—­how the dear Queen’s example purified it—­and how much less people bowed down to money then than now.”

“Ah, that was before the Americans and the Jews,” said Sir James Chide.

“People forget their responsibility,” said Lady Lucy, turning to Diana, and speaking so as not to be heard by the whole table.  “In old days it was birth; but now—­now when we are all democratic—­it should be character.—­Don’t you agree with me?”

“Other people’s character?” asked Diana.

“Oh, we mustn’t be unkind, of course.  But when a thing is notorious.  Take this young Brenner.  His father’s frauds ruined hundreds of poor people.  How can I receive him here, as if nothing had happened?  It ought not to be forgotten.  He himself ought to wish to live quietly!”

Diana gave a hesitating assent, adding:  “But I’m sorry for Mr. Brenner!”

Mr. Ferrier, as she spoke, leaned slightly across the tea-table as though to listen to what she said.  Lady Lucy moved away, and Mr. Ferrier, after spending a moment of quiet scrutiny on the young mistress of Beechcote, came to sit beside her.

Mrs. Fotheringham threw herself back in her chair with a little yawn.  “Mamma is more difficult than the Almighty!” she said, in a loud aside to Sir James Chide.  “One sin—­or even somebody else’s sin—­and you are done for.”

Sir James, who was a Catholic, and scrupulous in speech, pursed his lips slightly, drummed on the table with his fingers, and finally rose without reply, and betook himself to the Times.  Miss Drake meanwhile had been carried off to play billiards at the farther end of the hall by the young men of the party.  It might have been noticed that, before she went, she had spent a few minutes of close though masked observation of her cousin Oliver’s new friend.  Also, that she tried to carry Oliver Marsham with her, but unsuccessfully.  He had returned to Diana’s neighborhood, and stood leaning over a chair beside her, listening to her conversation with Mr. Ferrier.

His sister, Mrs. Fotheringham, was not content to listen.  Diana’s impressions of the country-side, which presently caught her ear, evidently roused her pugnacity.  She threw herself on all the girl’s rose-colored appreciations with a scorn hardly disguised.  All the “locals,” according to her, were stupid or snobbish—­bores, in fact, of the first water.  And to Diana’s discomfort and amazement, Oliver Marsham joined in.  He showed himself possessed of a sharper and more caustic tongue than Diana had yet suspected.  His sister’s sallies only amused him, and sometimes he improved on them, with epithets or comments, shrewder than hers indeed, but quite as biting.