’Ah! how small you must feel it!  Even I had to reconcile myself to it at first.’

’Well! perhaps your school-room was larger, but remember how bare it was, how empty of anything but deal tables, and forms, and mats.  Oh, indeed, Clare, I quite agree with mamma, who always says you have done very well for yourself; and Mr. Gibson too!  What an agreeable, well-informed man!’

‘Yes, he is,’ said his wife, slowly, as if she did not like to relinquish her role of a victim to circumstances quite immediately.  ’He is very agreeable, very; only we see so little of him; and of course he comes home tired and hungry, and not inclined to talk to his own family, and apt to go to sleep.’

‘Come, come!’ said Lady Harriet, ’I’m going to have my turn now.  We’ve had the complaint of a doctor’s wife, now hear the moans of a peer’s daughter.  Our house is so overrun with visitors; and literally to-day I have come to you for a little solitude.’

‘Solitude!’ exclaimed Mrs. Gibson.  ‘Would you rather be alone?’ slightly aggrieved.

’No, you dear silly woman; my solitude requires a listener, to whom I may say, “How sweet is solitude.”  But I am tired of the responsibility of entertaining.  Papa is so open-hearted, he asks every friend he meets with to come and pay us a visit.  Mamma is really a great invalid, but she does not choose to give up her reputation for good health, having always considered illness a want of self-control.  So she gets wearied and worried by a crowd of people who are all of them open-mouthed for amusement of some kind; just like a brood of fledglings in a nest; so I have to be parent-bird, and pop morsels into their yellow leathery bills, to find them swallowed down before I can think of where to find the next.  Oh, it’s “entertaining” in the largest, literalest, dreariest sense of the word.  So I have told a few lies this morning, and come off here for quietness and the comfort of complaining!’

Lady Harriet threw herself back in her chair, and yawned; Mrs. Gibson took one of her ladyship’s hands in a soft sympathizing manner, and murmured, ‘Poor Lady Harriet!’ and then she purred affectionately.

After a pause Lady Harriet started up and said,—­’I used to take you as my arbiter of morals when I was a little girl.  Tell me, do you think it wrong to tell lies?’

’Oh, my dear! how can you ask such questions?—­of course it is very wrong,—­very wicked indeed, I think I may say.  But I know you were only joking when you said you had told lies.’

’No, indeed, I was not.  I told as plump fat lies as you would wish to hear.  I said I “was obliged to go into Hollingford on business,” when the truth was there was no obligation in the matter, only an insupportable desire of being free from my visitors for an hour or two, and my only business was to come here, and yawn, and complain, and lounge at my leisure.  I really think I’m unhappy at having told a story, as children express it.’