“I dare say!” said Miss Raeburn, indignantly.  “That’s just what I object to.  Why can’t she throw herself into being in love with Aldous!  That’s her business, I imagine, just now—­if she were a young woman like anybody else one had ever seen—­instead of holding aloof from everything he does, and never being there when he wants her.  Oh!  I have no patience with her.  But, of course, I must—­” said Miss Raeburn, hastily correcting herself—­“of course, I must have patience.”

“It will all come right, I am sure, when they are married,” said Lady Winterbourne, rather helplessly.

“That’s just what my brother says,” cried Miss Raeburn, exasperated.  “He won’t hear a word—­declares she is odd and original, and that Aldous will soon know how to manage her.  It’s all very well; nowadays men don’t manage their wives; that’s all gone with the rest.  And I am sure, my dear, if she behaves after she is married as she is doing now, with that most objectionable person Mr. Wharton—­walking, and talking, and taking up his ideas, and going to his meetings—­she’ll be a handful for any husband.”

“Mr. Wharton!” said Lady Winterbourne, astonished.  Her absent black eyes, the eyes of the dreamer, of the person who lives by a few intense affections, saw little or nothing of what was going on immediately under them.  “Oh! but that is because he is staying in the house, and he is a Socialist; she calls herself one—­”

“My dear,” said Miss Raeburn, interrupting emphatically; “if—­you—­had—­now—­an unmarried daughter at home—­engaged or not—­would you care to have Harry Wharton hanging about after her?”

“Harry Wharton?” said the other, pondering; “he is the Levens’ cousin, isn’t he? he used to stay with them.  I don’t think I have seen him since then.  But yes, I do remember; there was something—­something disagreeable?”

She stopped with a hesitating, interrogative air.  No one talked less scandal, no one put the uglinesses of life away from her with a hastier hand than Lady Winterbourne.  She was one of the most consistent of moral epicures.

“Yes, extremely disagreeable,” said Miss Raeburn, sitting bolt upright.  “The man has no principles—­never had any, since he was a child in petticoats.  I know Aldous thinks him unscrupulous in politics and everything else.  And then, just when you are worked to death, and have hardly a moment for your own affairs, to have a man of that type always at hand to spend odd times with your lady love—­flattering her, engaging her in his ridiculous schemes, encouraging her in all the extravagances she has got her head twice too full of already, setting her against your own ideas and the life she will have to live—­you will admit that it is not exactly soothing!”

“Poor Aldous!” said Lady Winterbourne, thoughtfully, looking far ahead with her odd look of absent rigidity, which had in reality so little to do with a character essentially soft; “but you see he did know all about her opinions.  And I don’t think—­no, I really don’t think—­I could speak to her.”