“How wonderfully you observe everything, Lady Maria!” she exclaimed.  “How wonderfully!”

“I have had forty-seven seasons in London.  That’s a good many, you know.  Forty-seven seasons of debutantes and mothers tend toward enlightenment.  Now there is Agatha Slade, poor girl!  She’s of a kind I know by heart.  With birth and beauty, she is perfectly helpless.  Her people are poor enough to be entitled to aid from the Charity Organisation, and they have had the indecency to present themselves with six daughters—­six!  All with delicate skins and delicate little noses and heavenly eyes.  Most men can’t afford them, and they can’t afford most men.  As soon as Agatha begins to go off a little, she will have to step aside, if she has not married.  The others must be allowed their chance.  Agatha has had the advertising of the illustrated papers this season, and she has gone well.  In these days a new beauty is advertised like a new soap.  They haven’t given them sandwich-men in the streets, but that is about all that has been denied them.  But Agatha has not had any special offer, and I know both she and her mother are a little frightened.  Alix must come out next season, and they can’t afford frocks for two.  Agatha will have to be sent to their place in Ireland, and to be sent to Castle Clare is almost like being sent to the Bastille.  She’ll never get out alive.  She’ll have to stay there and see herself grow thin instead of slim, and colourless instead of fair.  Her little nose will grow sharp, and she will lose her hair by degrees.”

“Oh!” Emily Fox-Seton gave forth sympathetically.  “What a pity that would be!  I thought—­I really thought—­Lord Walderhurst seemed to admire her.”

“Oh, every one admires her, for that matter; but if they go no further that will not save her from the Bastille, poor thing.  There, Emily; we must go to bed.  We have talked enough.”

Chapter Three

To awaken in a still, delicious room, with the summer morning sunshine breaking softly into it through leafy greenness, was a delightful thing to Miss Fox-Seton, who was accustomed to opening her eyes upon four walls covered with cheap paper, to the sound of outside hammerings, and the rattle and heavy roll of wheels.  In a building at the back of her bed-sitting-room there lived a man whose occupation, beginning early in the morning, involved banging of a persistent nature.

She awakened to her first day at Mallowe, stretching herself luxuriously, with the smile of a child.  She was so thankful for the softness of her lavender-fragrant bed, and so delighted with the lovely freshness of her chintz-hung room.  As she lay upon her pillow, she could see the boughs of the trees, and hear the chatter of darting starlings.  When her morning tea was brought, it seemed like nectar to her.  She was a perfectly healthy woman, with a palate as unspoiled as that of a six-year-old child in the nursery.  Her enjoyment of all things was so normal as to be in her day and time an absolute abnormality.