This, in Bella’s idea, meant permission to go to the meet, and once at the meet it would be very easy to follow the hounds for half an hour or so, and to declare afterwards that it was Erebus’s doing, quite an involuntary bit of hunting on her own part. Bella was past mistress of those small arts by which an adroit unscrupulous woman manages to get her own way. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Mr. Piper presently, ‘if you want to have company when you’re out riding, you’d better ask one of Porkman’s girls to come and spend a week with you and bring her hoss. They’re first-rate horsewomen, both of ’em.’ ‘I should be very glad to have Vanessa,’ said Bella. ‘I think she’s the nicest--or, at any rate, the least nasty,’ she added hastily. Mrs. Porkman was a woman gifted with dim and uncultured aspirations after the beautiful. She had filled her drawing-room with heterogeneous bric-a-brac, including every variety of bad art, from Cleopatra’s needle in Cornish serpentine to the latest monstrosity in Bohemian glass, and she had called her two eldest daughters Stella and Vanessa, having read of two young women of that name once in a book. She had forgotten all about the book, and the young women, but the names had lingered in her memory. She had her eldest daughter christened Stella, and in due time there appeared a Vanessa to complete the pair, and to take to Stella’s cast-off frocks. Bella thought it would not be altogether inconvenient--nay, it would be very convenient--to have Vanessa Porkman for her companion. With Vanessa riding on her left side, Captain Standish might ride on her right, without giving occasion for scandal. She was not at all afraid of Vanessa being scandalized by anything she saw or heard. The second Miss Porkman was so far in advance of her age, that she had in a manner anticipated all the feminine fastness of the nineteenth century. The skating rink, the ladies’ club of the future, contained nothing calculated to shock Vanessa. Miss Porkman accepted Mrs. Piper’s invitation gladly. She owned with a charming candour that she was always glad to get away from home. She was quite open-minded in her contempt for her own family, and never even pretended to think them refined or well-bred. ‘Papa is simply dreadful,’ she would declare frankly. ‘I quite wonder how any of us put up with him. I suppose it is only because he is the family banker. If he wasn’t, we should put him in the gardener’s barrow and wheel him down to the edge of the river, and topple him comfortably in, and get rid of him as quietly as the gentle Hindoos do of their parents when they’ve lived long enough.’