Again.  She had done it once already, and the fish was only just going out of the room.  Mrs. Fisher could see that the other respectable member of the party, Mrs. Arbuthnot, was noticing it too.  Mrs. Arbuthnot was, she hoped and believed, respectable and well-meaning.  It is true she also had invaded her sitting-room, but no doubt she had been dragged there by the other one, and Mrs. Fisher had little if anything against Mrs. Arbuthnot, and observed with approval that she only drank water.  That was as it should be.  So, indeed, to give her her dues, did the freckled one; and very right at their age.  She herself drank wine, but with what moderation:  one meal, one glass.  And she was sixty-five, and might properly, and even beneficially, have had a least two.

“That,” she said to Lady Caroline, cutting right across what Mrs. Wilkins was telling them about her wonderful day and indicating the wine-glass, “is very bad for you.”

Lady Caroline, however, could not have heard, for she continued to sip, her elbow on the table, and listen to what Mrs. Wilkins was saying.

And what was it she was saying?  She had invited somebody to come and stay?  A man?

Mrs. Fisher could not credit her ears.  Yet it evidently was a man, for she spoke of the person as he.

Suddenly and for the first time—­but then this was most important—­Mrs. Fisher addressed Mrs. Wilkins directly.  She was sixty-five, and cared very little what sorts of women she happened to be with for a month, but if the women were to be mixed with men it was a different proposition altogether.  She was not going to be made a cat’s-paw of.  She had not come out there to sanction by her presence what used in her day to be called fast behaviour.  Nothing had been said at the interview in London about men; if there had been she would have declined, of course to come.

“What is his name?” asked Mrs. Fisher, abruptly interposing.

Mrs. Wilkins turned to her with a slight surprise.  “Wilkins,” she said.

“Wilkins?”

“Yes,”

“Your name?”

“And his.”

“A relation?”

“Not blood.”

“A connection?”

“A husband.”

Mrs. Fisher once more cast down her eyes.  She could not talk to Mrs. Wilkins.  There was something about the things she said. . .  “A husband.”  Suggesting one of many.  Always that unseemly twist to everything.  Why could she not say “My husband”?  Besides, Mrs. Fisher had, she herself knew not for what reason, taken both the Hampstead young women for widows.  War ones.  There had been an absence of mention of husbands at the interview which would not, she considered, be natural if such persons did after all exist.  And if a husband was not a relation, who was?  “Not blood.”  What a way to talk.  Why, a husband was the first of all relations.  How well she remembered Ruskin—­no, it was not Ruskin, it was the Bible that said a man should leave