“Youth, that knows no dread
    Of any horrors lurking far ahead,
    Across the sunny flowered fields of life.”

carries her safely right into the enemy’s camp.  Cruel youth!

“Won’t you come out with me and have a stroll in the gardens before tea?” asks Margaret, rising.  It seems to her that the social air is growing a little too sultry.  “Come, Tita; it will do you good.”

“Oh, I should love it!” says Tita, starting to her feet.

“Dear Margaret, you forget that, though Tita has been here for a week, this is the very first quiet moment I have had with her!  Do not tempt her from me!”

“Certainly not, Tessie, if you wish to have her with you,” says Margaret, reseating herself.

Now, more than ever, she feels there is danger in the air.

“Don’t let me keep you," says Lady Rylton, with deliberation.  “Go, dear Margaret, and get some of the sweet evening air—­it may be of use to your complexion; it is the tiniest bit yellow of late.  And when one is twenty-five—­it is twenty-five?”

She knows Margaret’s truthful nature.

“Thirty,” says Margaret, who knows her, too, to the very ground.

“Ah, impossible!” says Lady Rylton sweetly.  “Twenty-five, Margaret—­not a day more!  But, still, your complexion——­ There, go away and refresh it; and come back when I have had my little chat with my dearest Tita.”

Margaret casts a swift glance at the girl sitting there, apparently quite unconscious of the coming storm, and with her hands twined behind her head.  She has her legs crossed—­another sin—­and is waving one little foot up and down in a rather too careless fashion.

Tita looks back at her.

“Don’t be long,” says she inaudibly.

Margaret gives her a nod, and goes out through the window.

“My dearest child,” says Lady Rylton, nestling cosily into her chair, and smiling delicately at Tita over the top of her fan, “you may have noticed that I gave dear Margaret her congé with intent?”

“I saw that you wanted to get rid of her,” says Tita.

“I fear, my dear, your training has been somewhat defective,” says Lady Rylton, biting her lips.  “We never—­we in society, I mean—­never ‘get rid’ of people.  There are better ways of doing things, that——­”

“It must cause you a lot of trouble,” says Tita.  “It looks to me like walking half a dozen times round your bath on a frosty morning, knowing all along you will have to get into it.”

“Sh!” says Lady Rylton.  “My dear, you should not mention your bath before people.”

“Why not?  When one loves a thing, one speaks of it.  Don’t you love your bath?” asks Tita.

Lady Rylton sits glaring at her, as if too horrified to go on.  Tita continues: 

“If you don’t, you ought, you know,” says she.

“You must be out of your mind to talk to me like this,” says Lady Rylton at last.  Something in the girl’s air tells her that there is some little touch of devilment in it, some anger, some hatred.  “But, naturally, I make allowances for you.  Your birth, your surroundings, your bringing up, all preclude the idea that you should know how to manage yourself in the world into which you have been thrown by your marriage with my son.”