Nothing could affect her, of course; nothing that anybody did.  She was far too solidly seated in respectability.  At her back stood massively in a tremendous row those three great names she had offered, and they were not the only ones she could turn to for support and countenance.  Even if these young women—­she had no grounds for believing the one out in the garden to be really Lady Caroline Dester, she had merely been told she was—­even if these young women should all turn out to be what Browning used to call—­how well she remembered his amusing and delightful way of putting thing—­Fly-by-Nights, what could it possibly, or in any way matter to her?  Let them fly by night if they wished.  One was not sixty-five for nothing.  In any case there would only be four weeks of it, at the end of which she would see no more of them.  And in the meanwhile there were plenty of places where she could sit quietly away from them and remember.  Also there was her own sitting-room, a charming room, all honey-coloured furniture and pictures, with windows to the sea towards Genoa, and a door opening on to the battlements.  The house possessed two sitting-rooms, and she explained to that pretty creature Lady Caroline—­certainly a pretty creature, whatever else she was; Tennyson would have enjoyed taking her for blows on the downs—­who had seemed inclined to appropriate the honey-colored one, that she needed some little refuge entirely to herself because of her stick.

“Nobody wants to see an old woman hobbling about everywhere,” she had said.  “I shall be quite content to spend much of my time by myself in here or sitting out on these convenient battlements.”

And she had a very nice bedroom, too; it looked two ways, across the bay in the morning sun—­she liked the morning sun—­and onto the garden.  There were only two of these bedrooms with cross-views in the house, she and Lady Caroline had discovered, and they were by far the airiest.  They each had two beds in them, and she and Lady Caroline had had the extra beds taken out at once and put into two of the other rooms.  In this way there was much more space and comfort.  Lady Caroline, indeed, had turned hers into a bed-sitting-room, with the sofa out of the bigger drawing-room and the writing-table and the most comfortable chair, but she herself had not had to do that because she had her own sitting-room, equipped with what was necessary.  Lady Caroline had thought at first of taking the bigger sitting-room entirely for her own, because the dining-room on the floor below could quite well be used between meals to sit in by the two other, and was a very pleasant room with nice chairs, but she had not liked the bigger sitting-room’s shape—­it was a round room in the tower, with deep slit windows pierced through the massive walls, and a domed and ribbed ceiling arranged to look like an open umbrella, and it seemed a little dark.  Undoubtedly Lady Caroline had cast covetous glances at the honey-coloured room, and if she Mrs. Fisher, had been less firm would have installed herself in it.  Which would have been absurd.