Every one, like Mrs. Blankley, had a thirst to see something, and I was left alone with Aunt Anna, to discuss Pauline’s wedding.  As a rule, there is nothing Aunt Anna would sooner discuss, but I saw that something was worrying her, and I guessed that the unburdening of a rarely perturbed mind was imminent.  It was.

“Is anything wrong? —­ I asked.  “Any of the children worrying you?  She nodded and pointed to a diamond and ruby brooch and said plaintively.  “This one, Claud, just a little worrying.”

I tried to hide a smile.  “Oh, that’s Claud, is it?  I get a little mixed.”

“I dare say, dear,” she said; “but it’s quite simple, really.  Jack was the tiara, and so on.”

“What has Claud been doing?” I asked.  “Oh, nothing he can help, I feel sure.  He has a temperament, I believe.  What it is I don’t quite know; people grow out of it, I am told.  It’s not so much doing things as saying them; and his friends are odd, decidedly odd.  They wear curious ties, have disheveled hair, and are distinctly décolleté.  I don’t know if I should apply the word to men, but they are.”

I suggested that these little indiscretions on the part of extreme youth need not worry her.  But she said they did, in a way, because her other children were so very plain sailing.  They never took any one by surprise.  She then told me of poor Lady Adelaide, a near neighbor, at least as near as it was possible for any neighbor to be, considering the extent of the Manwell property, one of whose boys had written a book without her knowledge, and the other had married under exactly similar conditions.

I said I thought the writing of a book a minor offense compared to the matrimonial venture.  She agreed, but said they were both upsetting because unexpected.  As an instance, did I remember when Lady Victoria was butted by her pet lamb, when she was showing the Prince her white farm?  It wasn’t the upsetting she minded, so much as the unexpectedness of it, because the lamb had a blue ribbon round its neck!

“A black sheep in a white farm, Aunt Anna!” I said.

“No, dear, it was white, and it was a lamb.”

But to return to Lady Adelaide.  Now that Aunt Anna came to think of it, the marriage was the better of the two shocks, because financially it was a success, and the book wasn’t.  “Books aren’t,” She added.

“Is that all Claud does, or, rather, his friends do?” I asked.

“No, it’s not,” she said.  “Ever since he went to Oxford he has changed completely.  He has got into his head that we are a self-centered family, and that I am a prejudiced mother, when it is the only thing I am not.  I may be everything else for all I know, I may be daily breaking all the commandments without knowing it!  But a prejudiced mother I am not!  Before he went to Oxford he came into my bedroom one morning, and he said that he thought Maud and Edith were quite