"I am neither Joyce nor Miss Maliphant," says Lady Baltimore, with ill-suppressed contempt. "I wish you would try to remember that, Norman; it would spare time and trouble. You speak of Joyce as if she were the woman you love, and yet--would you subject the woman you love to unkind comment? If you cared you would not have treated her as----" "Ah, if I did care for her," interrupts he. "Well, don't you?" sternly. She has risen, and is looking down at him from the full height of her tall, slender figure, that now looks taller than usual. "Oh, immensely!" declares Mr. Beauclerk, airily. "My dear girl, you can't have studied me not to know that; as I have told you, I think her charming. Quite out of the common--quite." "That will do," shortly. "You condemn me," says he, in an aggrieved tone that has got something of amused surprise in it. "Yet you know--you of all others--how poor a devil I am! So poor, that I do not even permit the idea of marriage in my head." "Perhaps, however, you have permitted it to enter into hers!" says Lady Baltimore. "Oh, my dear Isabel!" with a light laugh and a protesting glance. "Do you think she would thank you for that suggestion?" "You should think. You should think," says Lady Baltimore, with some agitation. "She is a very young girl. She has lived entirely in the country. She knows nothing--nothing," throwing out her hand. "She is not awake to all the intriguing, lying, falsity," with a rush of bitter disgust, "that belongs to the bigger world beyond--the terrible world outside her own quiet one here." "She is quiet here, isn't she?" says Beauclerk, with admirable appreciation. "Pity to take her out of it. Eh? And yet, so far as I can see, that is the cruel task you would impose on me." "Norman," says his sister, turning suddenly and for the first time directly toward him. "Well, my dear. What?" throwing one leg negligently over the other. "It really comes to this, doesn't it? That you want me to marry a certain somebody, and that I think I cannot afford to marry her. Then it lies in the proverbial nutshell." "The man who cannot afford to marry should not afford himself the pleasures of flirtations," says Lady Baltimore, with decision. "No? Is that your final opinion? Good heavens! Isabel, what a brow! What a terrible glance! If," smiling, "you favor Baltimore with this style of thing whenever you disapprove of his smallest action I don't wonder he jibs so often at the matrimonial collar. You advised me to think just now; think yourself, my good Isabel, now and then, and probably you will find life easier." He is still smiling delightfully. He flings out this cruel gibe indeed in the most careless manner possible. "Ah! forget me," says she in a manner as careless as his own. If she has quivered beneath that thrust of his, at all events she has had strength enough to suppress all signs of it. "Think--not of her--I daresay she will outlive it--but of yourself."