The servant brought them coffee.  “Shall we smoke here,” said Miss Livingstone, “or in the drawing-room?”

“Oh, do you want to?  Are you quite sure you like it?  Please don’t on my account—­you really mustn’t.  Suppose it should make you ill?” If Hilda felt any tinge of amusement she kept it out of her face.  Nothing was there but cheerful concern.

“It won’t make me ill.”  Alicia lifted her chin with delicate assertiveness.  “I suppose you do smoke, don’t you?”

“Occasionally—­with some people.  Honestly, have you ever done it before?”

“Four times,” said Alicia, and then turned rose-colour with the apprehension that it sounded amateurish to have counted them.  “I thought it was one of your privileges to do it always, just as you—­”

“Go to bed with our boots on and put ice down the back of some Serene Highness’s neck.  I suppose it is, but now and then I prefer to dispense with it.  In my bath, for instance, and almost always in omnibuses.”

“How absurd you are!  Then we’ll stay here.”

Miss Howe softly manipulated her cigarette and watched Alicia sacrifice two matches.

“There’s Rosa Norton of our company,” she went on.  “Poor dear old Rosy.  She’s fifty-three—­grey hair smooth back, you know, and a kind of look of anxious mamma.  And it gets into her eyes and chokes her, poor dear; but blow her if she won’t be as Bohemian as anybody.  I’ve seen her smoke in a bonnet with strings tied under her chin.  I got up and went away.”

“But I can’t possibly affect you in that way,” said Alicia, putting her cigarette down to finish, as an afterthought, a marron glacee.  “I’m not old and I’m not grotesque.”

“No, but—­oh, all right.  After you with the matches, please.”

“I beg your pardon.  How thoughtless of me!  Dear me, mine has gone out.  Do you suppose anything is wrong with them?  Perhaps they’re damp.”

“Trifle dry, if anything,” Hilda returned, with the cigarette between her lips, “but in excellent order, really.”  She took it between her first and second finger for a glance at the gold letters at the end, leaned back and sent slow, luxurious spirals through her nostrils.  It was rather, Alicia reflected, like a horse on a cold day—­she hoped Miss Howe wouldn’t do it again.  But she presently saw that it was Miss Howe’s way of doing it.

“No, you’re not old and grotesque,” Hilda said, contemplatively; “you’re young and beautiful.”  The freedom seemed bred, imperceptibly and enjoyably, from the delicate cloud in the air.  Alicia flushed ever so little under it, but took it without wincing.  She had less than the common palate for flattery of the obvious kind, but this was something quite different—­a mere casual and unprejudiced statement of fact.

“Fairly,” she said, not without surprise at her own calmness; and there was an instant of silence, during which the commonplace seemed to be dismissed between them.