"No, not exactly; but somebody to help me." "Are you turned weak and sickly, Diana?" "No, mother." "Then you don't want another girl, any more than a frog wants an umbrella. Put your baby in the crib and teach her to lie there, when you are busy. That's the way you were brought up." "You must talk to Mr. Masters, mother." "I don't want to talk to Mr. Masters--I've got something else to do. But you can talk to him, Diana, and he'll do what you say." "It's the other way, mother. I must do what he says." Diana's tone was peculiar. "Then you're turned soft." "I think I am turned hard." "Your husband is easy to manage--for you." "Is he?" said Diana. "I am glad it isn't true. I despise men that are easy to manage. I am glad I can respect him, at any rate." Mrs. Starling looked at her daughter with an odd expression. It was curious and uncertain; but she asked no question. She seemed to change the subject; though perhaps the connection was close. "Did you hear the family are coming to Elmfield again this summer?" Diana's lips formed the word "no;" the breath of it hardly got out. "Yes, they're coming, sure enough. Phemie will be here next week; and her sister, what's her name?--Mrs. Reverdy--is here now." Silence. "I suppose they'll fill the house with company, as they did last time, and cut up their shines as usual. Well! they don't come in my way. But you'll have to see 'em, I guess." "Why?" "You know they make a great to do about your husband in that family. And Genevieve Reverdy seems uncommonly fond of you. She asked me no end of questions about you on Sabbath." There flushed a hot colour into Diana's cheeks, which faded away and left them very pale. "She hasn't grown old a bit," Mrs. Starling went on, talking rather uneasily; "nor she hain't grown wise, neither. She can't ask you how you do without a giggle. And she had dressed herself to come to church as if the church was a fair and she was something for sale. Flowers, and feathers, and laces, and ribbons, a little there and a little here; bows on her gloves, and bows on her shoes, and bows on her gown. I believed she would have tucked some into the corners of her mouth, if they would have stayed." Diana made no reply. She was looking out into the sunlit hillside in view from her window, and had grown visibly whiter since her mother came in. Mrs. Starling reviewed her for that instant with a keen, anxious, searching gaze, which changed before Diana turned her head. "I can't make out, for my part, what such folks are in the world for," she went on. "They don't do no good, to themselves nor to nobody else. And fools mostly contrive to do harm. Well--she's coming to see you;--she'll be along one of these days." "To see me!" Diana echoed. "So she says. Maybe it's all flummery. I daresay it is; but she talked a lot of it. You'd ha' thought there warn't any one else in the world she cared about seeing."