‘Come and let me hear how you get on with your playing.’  Alice followed into the drawing-room.  For the furnishing of the new house Richard had not trusted to his own instincts, but had taken counsel with a firm that he knew from advertisements.  The result was commonplace, but not intolerable.  His front room was regarded as the Princess’s peculiar domain; she alone dared to use it freely—­declined, indeed, to sit elsewhere.  Her mother only came a few feet within the door now and then; if obliged by Alice to sit down, she did so on the edge of a chair as near to the door as possible.  Most of her time Mrs. Mutimer still spent in the kitchen.  She had resolutely refused to keep more than one servant, and everything that servant did she all Alice’s objections she opposed an obstinate silence.  What herself performed over again, even to the making of beds.  To was the poor woman to do?  She had never in her life read more than an occasional paragraph of police news, and could not be expected to take up literature at her age.  Though she made no complaint, signs were not wanting that she had begun to suffer in health.  She fretted through the nights, and was never really at peace save when she anticipated the servant in rising early, and had an honest scrub at saucepans or fireirons before breakfast.  Her main discomfort came of the feeling that she no longer had a house of her own; nothing about her seemed to be her property with the exception of her old kitchen clock, and one or two articles she could not have borne to part with.  From being a rather talkative woman she had become very reticent; she went about uneasily, with a look of suspicion or of fear.  Her children she no longer ventured to command; the secret of their wealth weighed upon her, she was in constant dread on their behalf.  It is a bad thing for one such as Mrs. Mutimer to be thrown back upon herself in novel circumstances, and practically debarred from the only relief which will avail her—­free discussion with her own kind.  The result is a species of shock to the system, sure to manifest itself before long in one or other form of debility.

Alice seated herself at the piano, and began a finger exercise, laboriously, imperfectly.  For the first week or two it had given her vast satisfaction to be learning the piano; what more certain sign of having achieved ladyhood?  It pleased her to assume airs with her teacher—­a very deferential lady—­to put off a lesson for a fit of languidness; to let it be understood how entirely time was at her command.  Now she was growing rather weary of flats and sharps, and much preferred to read of persons to whom the same nomenclature was very applicable in the books she obtained from a circulating library.  Her reading had hitherto been confined to the fiction of the penny papers; to procure her pleasure in three gaily-bound volumes was another evidence of rise in the social scale; it was like ordering your wine by the dozen after being accustomed to a poor chance bottle now and then.  At present Alice spent the greater part of her day floating on the gentle milky stream of English romance.  Her brother was made a little uneasy by this taste; he had not studied the literature in question.