Remembering days when she herself had been at a disadvantage with people who were fortunate enough to be of importance, and recalling what her secret tremor before them had been, Emily was very nice indeed to little Mrs. Osborn.  She knew from experience things which would be of use to her—­things about lodgings and things about shops.  Osborn had taken lodgings in Duke Street, and Emily knew the quarter thoroughly.  Walderhurst watched her being nice, through his fixed eyeglass, and he decided that she had really a very good manner.  Its goodness consisted largely in its directness.  While she never brought forth unnecessarily recollections of the days when she had done other people’s shopping and had purchased for herself articles at sales marked 11-3/4_d_, she was interestingly free from any embarrassment in connection with the facts.  Walderhurst, who had been much bored by himself and other people in time past, actually found that it gave a fillip to existence to look on at a woman who, having been one of the hardest worked of the genteel labouring classes, was adapting herself to the role of marchioness by the simplest of processes, and making a very nice figure at it too, in her entirely unbrilliant way.  If she had been an immensely clever woman, there would have been nothing special in it.  She was not clever at all, yet Walderhurst had seen her produce effects such as a clever woman might have laboured for and only attained by a stroke of genius.  As, for instance, when she had met for the first time after her engagement, a certain particularly detestable woman of rank, to whom her relation to Walderhurst was peculiarly bitter.  The Duchess of Merwold had counted the Marquis as her own, considering him fitted by nature to be the spouse of her eldest girl, a fine young woman with projecting teeth, who had hung fire.  She felt Emily Fox-Seton’s incomprehensible success to be a piece of impudent presumption, and she had no reason to restrain the expression of her sentiments so long as she conveyed them by methods of inference and inclusion.

“You must let me congratulate you very warmly, Miss Fox-Seton,” she said, pressing her hand with maternal patronage.  “Your life has changed greatly since we last saw each other.”

“Very greatly indeed,” Emily flushed frankly in innocent gratitude as she answered.  “You are very kind.  Thank you, thank you.”

“Yes, a great change.”  Walderhurst saw that her smile was feline and asked himself what the woman was going to say next.  “The last time we met you called to ask me about the shopping you were to do for me.  Do you remember?  Stockings and gloves, I think.”

Walderhurst observed that she expected Emily to turn red and show herself at a loss before the difficulties of the situation.  He was on the point of cutting into the conversation and disposing of the matter himself when he realised that Emily was neither gaining colour nor losing it, but was looking honestly into her Grace’s eyes with just a touch of ingenuous regret.