“Really a contrast, when you two are together!  As to reputation, there is an exchange of colours.  Those lawyers hold the keys of the great world, and a naughty world it is, I fear—­with exceptions, who are the salt, but don’t taste so much.  I can’t help enjoying the people at Mrs. Lawrence Finchley’s.  I like to feel I can amuse them, as they do me.  One puzzles for what they say—­in somebody’s absence, I mean.  They must take Lord Ormont for a perfect sphinx; unless they are so silly as to think they may despise him, or suppose him indifferent.  Oh, that upper class!  It’s a garden, and we can’t help pushing to enter it; and fair flowers, indeed, but serpents too, like the tropics.  It tries us more than anything else in the world—­well, just as good eating tries the constitution.  He ought to know it and feel it, and give his wife all the protection of his name, instead of—­not that he denies:  I have brought him to that point; he cannot deny it with me.  But not to present her—­to shun the Court; not to introduce her to his family, to appear ashamed of her!  My darling Aminta, a month of absence for reflection on your legally-wedded husband’s conduct increases my astonishment.  For usually men old enough to be the grandfathers of their wives—­”

“Oh, pray, aunty, pray, pray!” Aminta cried, and her body writhed.  “No more to-night.  You mean well, I am sure.  Let us wait.  I shall sleep, perhaps, if I go to bed early.  I dare say I am spiritless—­not worth more than I get.  I gave him the lead altogether; he keeps it.  In everything else he is kind; I have all the luxuries—­enough to loathe them.  Kiss me and say good night.”

Aminta made it imperative by rising.  Her aunt stood up, kissed, and exclaimed, “I tell you you are a queenly creature, not to be treated as any puny trollop of a handmaid.  And although he is a great nobleman, he is not to presume to behave any longer, my dear, as if your family had no claim on his consideration.  My husband, Alfred Pagnell, would have laid that before him pretty quick.  You are the child of the Farrells and the Solers, both old families; on your father’s side you are linked with the oldest nobility in Europe.  It flushes one to think of it!  Your grandmother, marrying Captain Algernon Farrell, was the legitimate daughter of a Grandee of Spain; as I have told Lord Ormont often, and I defy him to equal that for a romantic marriage in the annals of his house, or boast of bluer blood.  Again, the Solers—­”

“We take the Solers for granted, aunty, good night.”

“Commoners, if you like; but established since the Conquest.  That is, we trace the pedigree.  And to be treated, even by a great nobleman, as if we were stuff picked up out of the ditch!  I declare, there are times when I sit and think and boil.  Is it chivalrous, is it generous—­is it, I say, decent—­is it what Alfred would have called a fair fulfilment of a pact, for your wedded