"I know for a certainty "--with growing warmth--"that they are nothing of the kind." "Then why do not they go out anywhere?" "Because they do not choose." "Because no one asks them, more likely! Why were they so determined not to be introduced to me?" "How can I tell? Perhaps"--with a wrathful laugh--"they did not like your looks!" She echoes his false mirth with no inferior exasperation. "Who is ill-bred now?" Her tone calls him back to a sense of the ungentleman-likeness and puerility of his conduct. "I!"--he replies contritely--"undoubtedly I! but----" "Do not apologize," interrupts she, recovering her equanimity with that ease which she has transmitted to her son; "I like you for standing up for them if they _are_ your friends; and I hope that you will do the same good office for me when someone sticks pins into me behind my back; but come now, let us be rational; surely we may talk quietly about them without insulting each other, may not we?" "I do not know; we can try." "I suppose"--a little ironically--"that you are not so sensitive about them but that you can bear me to ask a few perfectly harmless questions?" He writhes. "Of course! of course! what are they to me?--they are nothing to me!" A look of incredulity, which she perhaps does not take any very great pains to conceal, spreads over her face. "Then you really will be doing me a great service if you tell me just exactly all you know about them, good and bad." "All I know about them," replies Jim in a rapid parrot-voice, as if he were rattling over some disagreeable lesson--"is that they were extremely kind to me ten years ago; that they had a beautiful place in Devonshire, and were universally loved and respected: I hear that they have let their place; so no doubt they are not so much loved and respected as they were; and now you know as much about the matter as I do!" CHAPTER XXII. "Welcome ever smiles; and Farewell goes out sighing." This last clause is not always true. For example, there is very little sighing in the farewells made to Mrs. Byng by the two young men who see her off at the Florence Railway Station. And Mrs. Byng herself has been too much occupied in manoeuvring to get a few last private words with each of her escort to have much time for sighing either.