“Well, what?” I answered, unsuspecting.

“I told you everything turned up at the end!” she said, confidently.  “Look at the lady’s nose!”

“It does turn up at the end—­certainly,” I answered, glancing back at her.  “But I hardly see—­”

“Hubert, you are growing dull!  You were not so at Nathaniel’s. . . .  It is the lady herself who has turned up, not her nose—­though I grant you that turns up too—­the lady I require for our tour in India; the not impossible chaperon.”

“Her nose tells you that?”

“Her nose, in part; but her face as a whole, too, her dress, her chair, her mental attitude to things in general.”

“My dear Hilda, you can’t mean to tell me you have divined her whole nature at a glance, by magic!”

“Not wholly at a glance.  I saw her come on board, you know—­she transhipped from some other line at Aden as we did, and I have been watching her ever since.  Yes, I think I have unravelled her.”

“You have been astonishingly quick!” I cried.

“Perhaps—­but then, you see, there is so little to unravel!  Some books, we all know, you must ‘chew and digest’; they can only be read slowly; but some you can glance at, skim, and skip; the mere turning of the pages tells you what little worth knowing there is in them.”

“She doesn’t look profound,” I admitted, casting an eye at her meaningless small features as we paced up and down.  “I incline to agree you might easily skim her.”

“Skim her—­and learn all.  The table of contents is so short. . . .  You see, in the first place, she is extremely ‘exclusive’; she prides herself on her ‘exclusiveness’:  it, and her shoddy title, are probably all she has to pride herself upon, and she works them both hard.  She is a sham great lady.”

As Hilda spoke, Lady Meadowcroft raised a feebly querulous voice.  “Steward! this won’t do!  I can smell the engine here.  Move my chair.  I must go on further.”

“If you go on further that way, my lady,” the steward answered, good-humouredly, but with a man-servant’s deference for any sort of title, “you’ll smell the galley, where they’re cooking the dinner.  I don’t know which your ladyship would like best—­the engine or the galley.”

The languid figure leaned back in the chair with an air of resignation.  “I’m sure I don’t know why they cook the dinners up so high,” she murmured, pettishly, to her husband.  “Why can’t they stick the kitchens underground—­in the hold, I mean—­instead of bothering us up here on deck with them?”