Lady Harrison was diffident equally with anyone, servant-girl or marchioness. Her people, plain-spoken folk, had early hammered it home to her that she was all knuckles and thumbs. In these latter days, it was a pleasant habit of Sir Tom, in those moments when his self-complacency sat upon him most inspiringly, to stick his thumbs in the armholes of his vest, puff regardlessly into his wife's face the smoke from a plethoric cigar, and remind her of her good-fortune in "getting" him--a feat she, who had been awkward Martha Andrews, had performed quite passively, after Sir Thomas (then young Tom Harrison, paying for "private board" at the Andrews home) had tasted her apple pie and slept in a bedroom she had "fixed up" for his accommodation. Probably if she had been less shy, she would not have been so good a home-maker. She would then have gone out with "the boys", as the other Andrews girls did, and left the pies and bedrooms to mother's attention. "This is the new gel, ma'am," said Alice. "Oh," said Lady Harrison, leaning her knuckles on the edge of the table and raising a wandering hand to the brooch at her throat, "that's very nice." This, the only social expression that had "stuck" in Lady Harrison's memory, was her sole verbal resource when locked in the besetting shyness that rose up and gripped her when she first faced a stranger. "She'll start at once, ma'am," said Alice, not trying very arduously to conceal her impatience to be gone. "Oh," said Lady Harrison again, fingering the brooch, "that's--very nice--very nice indeed." "Well", said Alice, turning the doorknob as a preliminary to her exit, "I'll leave 'er along o' you, shall I, ma'am, an' go see to my packin'." "A-a-yes," said Lady Harrison, "yes, do. That's--that's very nice--quite." Alice backed out and clicked the door shut easily. She had not yet collected her wages, or she would have banged the door--as a parting sign that she was emancipated, and therefore free to be delightfully saucy and flopping. Whether it was that Alice had, in some queer way, been the discordant note; or that the young woman and the middle-aged one, so oppositely natured and each possessing what the other lacked, flowed at once mentally to a comfortable, common level of distributed qualities; or whether it was that Daisy's comely and now double-dimpled pleasantness as she waited guardedly for the other to speak, just naturally made communications easy: it is certain that Lady Harrison's restraint, as soon as the door closed behind the sour-faced Alice, slipped away so easily and wholly that she herself was agreeably surprised. She pulled down her spectacles from her forehead and settled them across her nose. As she did this the mistress of the big Harrison house looked more homelike and motherly than ever. Daisy's warmth toward her increased proportionately.