'I am sure you have. But don't you think that sometimes the very essence of real friendship consists in--' 'Mr. Barnes always had his own dressing-room.' This was unexpected, and it silenced me. After a moment I said lamely, 'I'm sure he did. But you were saying about Dol--about Mrs. Jewks--' 'Yes.' Mrs. Barnes sighed. 'Well, it cannot harm you or her,' she went on after a pause, 'for me to tell you that the first thing Dolly did as soon as she was grown up was to make an impetuous marriage.' 'Isn't that rather what most of us begin with?' 'Few are so impetuous. Mine, for instance, was not. Mine was the considered union of affection with regard, entered into properly in the eye of all men, and accompanied by the good wishes of relations and friends. Dolly's--well, Dolly's was impetuous. I cannot say ill-advised, because she asked no one's advice. She plunged--it is not too strong a word, and unfortunately can be applied to some of her subsequent movements--into a misalliance, and in order to contract it she let herself down secretly at night from her bedroom window by means of a sheet.' Mrs. Barnes paused. 'How very--how very spirited,' I couldn't help murmuring. Indeed I believe I felt a little jealous. Nothing in my own past approaches this in enterprise. And I not only doubted if I would ever have had the courage to commit myself to a sheet, but I felt a momentary vexation that no one had ever suggested that on his account I should. Compared to Dolly, I am a poor thing. 'So you can understand,' continued Mrs. Barnes, 'how earnestly I wish to keep my sister to lines of normal conduct. She has been much punished for her departures from them. I am very anxious that nothing should be said to her that might seem--well, that might seem to be even slightly in sympathy with actions or ways of looking at life that have in the past brought her unhappiness, and can only in the future bring her yet more.' 'But why,' I asked, still thinking of the sheet, 'didn't she go out to be married through the front door?' 'Because our father would never have allowed his front door to be used for such a marriage. You forget that it was a school, and she was running away with somebody who up till a year or two previously had been one of the pupils.' 'Oh? Did she marry a foreigner?' Mrs. Barnes flushed a deep, painful red. She is brown and weather-beaten, yet through the brownness spread unmistakeably this deep red. Obviously she had forgotten what she told me the other day about the boys all being foreigners. 'Let us not speak evil of the dead,' she said with awful solemnity; and for the rest of the walk would talk of nothing but the view.