Leonora drew aside the portiere.

‘My dear girls!’ she protested benevolently, standing there.

The feud, always apt thus to leap into a perfectly Corsican fury of bitterness, sank back at once to its ordinary level of passive mutual repudiation.  Rose and Millicent were not bereft of the finer feelings which distinguish humanity from the beasts of the jungle; sometimes they could be almost affectionate.  There were, however, moments when to all appearance they hated each other with a tigerish and crouching hatred such as may be found only between two opposing feminine temperaments linked together by the family tie.

‘What’s this about your going to London, Rosie?’ Leonora asked in a voice soothing but surprised, when the meal had begun.

‘You know, mamma.  I mentioned it to you the other day.’  The girl’s tone implied that what she had said to Leonora perhaps went in at one ear and out at the other.

Leonora remembered.  Rose had in fact casually told her that a school friend in Oldcastle who was studying for the same examination as herself had gone to London for six weeks’ final coaching under what Rose called a ‘lady-crammer.’

‘But you didn’t tell me that you wanted to go as well,’ Leonora said.

‘Yes, mother, I did,’ Rose affirmed with calm.  ’You forget.  I’m sure I shan’t pass if I don’t go.  So I asked father while you were all at this opera affair.’

‘And what did he say?’ Ethel demanded.

‘He said he would make inquiries this morning and see.’

Ethel gave a laugh of good-natured derision.  ‘Yes,’ she exclaimed, ’and you’ll see, too!’

In response to this oracular utterance, Rose merely bent lower over her plate.

Millicent, conscious of a brilliant vocation and of an impassioned resolve, refrained from the discussion, and the sense of her ineffable superiority bore hard on that lithe, mercurial youthfulness.  The ‘Signal,’ in praising Millicent’s performance at the opera, had predicted for her a career, and had thoughtfully quoted instances of well-born amateurs who had become professionals and made great names on the stage.  Millicent knew that all Bursley was talking about her.  And yet the family life was unaltered; no one at home seemed to be much impressed, not even Ethel, though Ethel’s sympathy could be depended upon; Milly was still Milly, the youngest, the least important, the chit of a thing.  At times it appeared to her as though the triumph of that ecstatic and glorious night was after all nothing but an illusion, and that only the interminable dailiness of family life was real.  Then the ruthless and calculating minx in her shut tight those pretty lips and coldly determined that nothing should stand against ambition.

‘I do hope you will pass,’ said Leonora cordially to Rose.  ’You certainly deserve to.’

’I know I shan’t, unless I get some outside help.  My brain isn’t that sort of brain.  It’s another sort.  Only one has to knuckle down to these wretched exams first.’