Lady Beranger becomes her costly garments as well as they become her. She is a very tall woman, and very stately and handsome. Perhaps in the very palmiest days her beauty had never been classical. How seldom beauty is so! but she is very imposing to look on, and she is exceptionally thoroughbred in appearance. A woman in fact who bears upon her the unmistakable _cachet_ of blue blood. She has of course faults, and the gravest of them is love of money. It is the dream of her life that her lovely bouquet of daughters shall marry “fortunes,” and her cross at present consists in the bitter knowledge that both Trixy and Zai are in love, and in love with a pauper. A pauper, for Trixy is, in her way--a very different way to her sisters’--as much in love with Carl Conway as Zai is. Afternoon tea is quite an institution at Sandilands, and at half-past four Lady Beranger settles down to a substantial meal of cake and muffins and bread and butter, while the olive branches look on in silent wonderment, and ask themselves if a love of the fleshpots comes hand in hand with riper years. “Trixy, I forgot to tell you that I met old Stubbs near the Lodge gates, and he is coming to call this afternoon,” Gabrielle announces, between slow sips of her tea. “Is he! well he won’t find _me_ at home,” a thin and peevish voice answers. It seems to rise from the depths of one of the most comfortable chairs, on which an amber-haired white witch lies half _perdu_. This is Trixy Beranger, Lady Beranger’s eldest marketable article, and a lovely thing it is. She would serve for an exact model, as she lounges here, of the lovely Persian girl that our Poet Laureate saw in his excursion up the Tigris to “Bagdad’s shrines of fretted gold.” Trixy is a rare and radiant maiden--a bird of Paradise, over whom most men go mad, but do not care to wed, and to whom most women are cold, conscious that their good looks pale beside hers. Gabrielle’s glowing beauty of coal-black tresses and creamy skin, waxes quite dim in Trixy’s proximity, and Baby’s cherub face and golden curls are nowhere, but Zai--well, Zai is a law unto herself. Society last year had fallen down helplessly on its knees, and worshipped the _débutante_ of the season, the Hon. Beatrix Beranger. From the Royalties downwards she was the rage. They even likened her to every poetical saint in the calendar, and Trixy, not over-weighted with brains, and with her lovely head completely turned, in acknowledgment of the compliment, considers herself in duty bound towards mankind in general, and in fact a point of conscience, to “pose” accordingly.