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figure.’ ‘It isn’t the dress; it’s the way they put it on.’ While from the fattest, reddest, and most good-natured of the three ladies came a murmur, ‘Well, she is rather nice-looking, but I do think she looks as if she had a history.’

“There is a certain amount of probability about this latter suggestion, isn’t there?

“Clare, as I said, refused to be interested in the Green Street ambassadors. She sat in the stony mood she puts on sometimes, meeting all my imploring glances with a Medusa-like glare from her spectacles, and her only contribution to the conversation—when in my despair I passed the hat round to her, as it were—consisted of a peculiarly cold-drawn trisyllabic, aristocratic ‘Really!’ I don’t think any single word in the English language contains such an amount of cold water as this little exclamation. It holds quite a gallon; but it must be pronounced by an Englishwoman of pure descent; no mere outsider, even after three generations in the same parish, can possibly attain to its linked sweetness long drawn out, and no simple colonial speaker need attempt even a far-off imitation. I never do, for one, but confine myself closely to the far inferior, but sympathetic ‘Fancy!’ with an occasional lapse—in moments of excitement—into ‘Just fancy!’ But then I