Mrs. Jordan took this in with complete intelligence. “Yes, and I dare say it’s some of your people that _I_ do.” Her companion assented, but discriminated. “I doubt if you ‘do’ them as much as I! Their affairs, their appointments and arrangements, their little games and secrets and vices—those things all pass before me.” This was a picture that could make a clergyman’s widow not imperceptibly gasp; it was in intention moreover something of a retort to the thousand tulips. “Their vices? Have they got vices?” Our young critic even more overtly stared then with a touch of contempt in her amusement: “Haven’t you found _that_ out?” The homes of luxury then hadn’t so much to give. “_I_ find out everything.” Mrs. Jordan, at bottom a very meek person, was visibly struck. “I see. You do ‘have’ them.” “Oh I don’t care! Much good it does me!” Mrs. Jordan after an instant recovered her superiority. “No—it doesn’t lead to much.” Her own initiations so clearly did. Still—after all; and she was not jealous: “There must be a charm.” “In seeing them?” At this the girl suddenly let herself go. “I hate them. There’s that charm!” Mrs. Jordan gaped again. “The _real_ ‘smarts’?” “Is that what you call Mrs. Bubb? Yes—it comes to me; I’ve had Mrs. Bubb. I don’t think she has been in herself, but there are things her maid has brought. Well, my dear!”—and the young person from Cocker’s, recalling these things and summing them up, seemed suddenly to have much to say. She didn’t say it, however; she checked it; she only brought out: “Her maid, who’s horrid—_she_ must have her!” Then she went on with indifference: “They’re _too_ real! They’re selfish brutes.” Mrs. Jordan, turning it over, adopted at last the plan of treating it with a smile. She wished to be liberal. “Well, of course, they do lay it out.” “They bore me to death,” her companion pursued with slightly more temperance. But this was going too far. “Ah that’s because you’ve no sympathy!”