"Oh, well," Mrs. John Nixon's radial arm described a flying circle of cake-crumbs about her chair as she indicated, with a sweeping gesture, that she washed her hands of the matter, "if you're satisfied, we are." "Daisy," Lady Frances said, levelly, "has proved a very fine and frank and sweet young woman. Her adaptability, too, has been most satisfactory. I have become very much attached to her--and I really cannot listen, nor will I listen, to anything against my son's wife." "Oh, all right, all--right," Lovina Nixon smacked her cup down. "I wish't you'd had a siege of her like I've had, so I do. You'd talk different." "I think," Lady Frances Ware rose out of her chair with remarkable vigor for eighty-two, "that you have probably taken a wrong course with her--in fact, I feel quite sure you must have taken a wrong course with her. Now, as I proposed before, we will change the subject. Would you care to go for a motor ride? I shall tell Davitt, the chauffeur, to have you back here in time for a leisurely and comfortable meal before your train." Mrs. Lovina Nixon shrugged. "Might's well do that as anything else, I s'pose." Lady Frances rang the bell. "Telephone Davitt," she said, to Ada the maid, "to bring around the larger car. Then tell Lady Ware her mother would like to do a little shopping, and wishes her to go as well. Take my hand-bag with you, and tell Lady Ware she may use what money she likes from my purse, if she is short." A quarter of an hour later, Lady Frances, having seen the motor car off down the drive, returned to her sanctum, sat down quietly in her big chair, and took up her sewing. Presently, however, her needle paused, and she found herself, after a habit she had, drifting off into half-audible soliloquy. "William said," she murmured musingly, "that he thought the man a fair masculine type, who might have developed well, with proper opportunity. But that woman! Thoroughly nasty, ingrate, underhand. An improvement in manners would only be a hopelessly inadequate veneer. A nature such as she has would not be mended by the opportunities of three generations and more. I do hope William does _not_ intend to take those people in tow, for I am really not equal to it." A telephone interrupted the reverie of Lady Frances. Five minutes later, pale and anxious, but not forgetting the practicality that had been her lifetime's habit, Lady Frances Ware was in her son's rooms across the hall, turning down the bed for the reception of Sir William who, knocked down by a motor dray as he was piloting the half-drunken Nixon across a crowded street downtown was being brought home in the ambulance.