“I don’t want my girls talked about, thank you, Ewen!” His wife gave an angry dig to the word “my.”  “Everybody says what a nice ladylike girl Alice is.  But Nora often gives me a deal of trouble—­and if she takes to imitating Connie, and wanting to go about without a chaperon, I don’t know what I shall do.  My dear Ewen, do you know what I discovered last night?”

Mrs. Hooper rose and stood over her husband impressively.

“Well—­what?”

“You remember Connie went to bed early.  Well, when I came up, and passed her door, I noticed something—­somebody in that room was—­smoking!  I could not be mistaken.  And this morning I questioned the housemaid.  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ she said, ’her ladyship smoked two cigarettes last night, and Mrs. Tinkler’—­that’s the maid—­’says she always smokes two before she goes to bed.’  Then I spoke to Tinkler—­whose manner to me, I consider, is not at all what it should be—­and she said that Connie smoked three cigarettes a day always—­that Lady Risborough smoked—­that all the ladies in Rome smoked—­that Connie began it before her mother died—­and her mother didn’t mind—­”

“Well then, my dear, you needn’t mind,” exclaimed Dr. Hooper.

“I always thought Ella Risborough went to pieces—­rather—­in that dreadful foreign life,” said Mrs. Hooper firmly.  “Everybody does—­you can’t help it.”

“I don’t know what you mean by going ‘to pieces,’” said Ewen Hooper warmly.  “I only know that when they came here ten years ago, I thought her one of the most attractive—­one of the most charming women I had ever seen.”

From where he stood, on the hearth-rug of his study, smoking an after-breakfast pipe, he looked down—­frowning—­upon his wife, and Mrs. Hooper felt that she had perhaps gone too far.  Never had she forgotten, never had she ceased to resent her own sense of inferiority and disadvantage, beside her brilliant sister-in-law on the occasion of that long past visit.  She could still see Ella Risborough at the All Souls’ luncheon given to the newly made D.C.Ls, sitting on the right of the Vice-Chancellor, and holding a kind of court afterwards in the library; a hat that was little more than a wreath of forget-me-nots on her dark hair, and a long, lace cloak draping the still young and graceful figure.  She remembered vividly the soft, responsive eyes and smile, and the court of male worshippers about them.  Professors, tutors young and old, undergraduates and heads of houses, had crowded round the mother and the long-legged, distinguished-looking child, who clung so closely to her side; and if only she could have given Oxford a few more days, the whole place would have been at Ella Risborough’s feet.  “So intelligent too!” said the enthusiastic—­“so learned even!” A member of the Roman “Accademia dei Lincei,” with only one other woman to keep her company in that august band; and yet so modest, so unpretending, so full of laughter, and life, and sex!  Mrs. Hooper, who generally found herself