She said this last partly because she liked Emily and knew it would please her to hear that her husband went to the length of dwelling on her charms in his conversation with other people, partly because it entertained her to see the large creature’s eyelids flutter and a big blush sweep her cheek.

“He really was in great luck when he discovered you,” her ladyship went on briskly.  “As for that, I was in luck myself.  Suppose you had been a girl who could not have been left.  As Walderhurst is short of female relatives, it would have fallen to me to decently dry-nurse you.  And there would have been the complications arising from a girl being baby enough to want to dance about to places, and married enough to feel herself entitled to defy her chaperone; she couldn’t have been trusted to chaperone herself.  As it is, Walderhurst, can go where duty calls, etc., and I can make my visits and run about, and you, dear thing, are quite happy at Palstrey playing Lady Bountiful and helping the little half-breed woman to expect her baby.  I daresay you sit and make dolly shirts and christening robes hand in hand.”

“We enjoy it all very much,” Emily answered, adding imploringly, “please don’t call her a little half-breed woman.  She’s such a dear little thing, Lady Maria.”

Lady Maria indulged in the familiar chuckle and put up her lorgnette to examine her again.

“There’s a certain kind of early Victorian saintliness about you, Emily Walderhurst, which makes my joy,” she said.  “You remind me of Lady Castlewood, Helen Pendennis, and Amelia Sedley, with the spitefulness and priggishness and catty ways left out.  You are as nice as Thackeray thought they were, poor mistaken man.  I am not going to suffuse you with blushes by explaining to you that there is what my nephew would call a jolly good reason why, if you were not an early Victorian and improved Thackerayian saint, you would not be best pleased at finding yourself called upon to assist at this interesting occasion.  Another kind of woman would probably feel like a cat towards the little Osborn.  But even the mere reason itself, as a reason, has not once risen in your benign and pellucid mind.  You have a pellucid mind, Emily; I should be rather proud of the word if I had invented it myself to describe you.  But I didn’t.  It was Walderhurst.  You have actually wakened up the man’s intellects, such as they are.”

She evidently had a number of opinions of the Osborns.  She liked neither of them, but it was Captain Osborn she especially disliked.

“He is really an underbred person,” she explained, “and he hasn’t the sharpness to know that is the reason Walderhurst detests him.  He had vulgar, cheap sort of affairs, and nearly got into the kind of trouble people don’t forgive.  What a fool a creature in his position is to offend the taste of the man he may inherit from, and who, if he were not antagonistic to him, would regard him