But if Flossie felt no uneasiness at the approaches of Mr. Rickman and Miss Harden, the news that Lucia was staying under the same roof with the impossible young poet could hardly be received with complacency by her relations.  It threw Edith Jewdwine into an agony of alarm.  Horace as yet knew nothing about it; for he was abroad.  Even Edith had heard nothing until her return from her autumn holiday in Wales, when a letter from Lucia informed her that she would be staying for the next week or two with Sophie Roots in Tavistock Place.  Edith was utterly unprepared for her cousin’s change of plans.  She had not asked Lucia to go with her to Wales; for Lucia’s last idea had been to spend September and October in Devonshire with Kitty Palliser.  Edith, eager for her holiday, had not stopped to see whether the arrangements with Kitty were completed; and Lucia, aware of Edith’s impatience, had omitted to mention that they were not.  But what made Lucia’s move so particularly trying to Edith was the circumstance that relations between them had latterly been a little strained; and when Edith searched her heart she found that for this unhappy tension it was she and not Lucia who had been to blame.

And now (while Lucia was resting calmly on Mr. Rickman’s sofa), in the grave and beautiful drawing-room of the old brown house at Hampstead a refined and fastidious little lady walked up and down in a state of high nervous excitement.  That little lady bore in her slight way a remarkable resemblance to her brother Horace.  It was Horace in petticoats, diminutive and dark.  There was the same clearness, the same distinction of feature, the same supercilious forehead, the same quivering of the high-bred nose, the same drooping of the unhappy mouth.  Bat the flame of Edith’s small steel black eyes revealed a creature of more ardour and more energy.

At the moment Edith was visited with severe compunction; an intrusive uncomfortable feeling that she had never before been thus compelled to entertain.  For looking back upon the past two years she perceived that her conduct as mistress of that drawing-room and house had not always been as fastidious and refined as she could wish.  The house and the drawing-room were mainly the cause of it.  Before Horace became editor of The Museion, Edith had been mistress of a minute establishment kept up with difficulty on a narrow income.  In a drawing-room seventeen feet by twelve she received with difficulty a small circle of the cultured; ladies as refined and fastidious as herself, and (after superhuman efforts on the part of these ladies) occasionally a preoccupied and superlatively married man.  From this position, compatible with her exclusiveness, but not with her temperament or her ambition, Edith found herself raised suddenly to a perfect eminence of culture and refinement as head of the great editor’s house.  She held a sort of salon, to which her brother’s reputation attracted many figures if possible more distinguished