"I should have felt as she did. Besides, Lady Di Lyell's no fool. Look how you had him to yourself all day long ... oh yes!--I know what you are going to say. Perhaps there wasn't. But some people can get on perfectly well without _any_ love-making. I think that way's the worst; it's insidious and hypocritical. Yes, Judith!--if you _are_ going to flirt with a married man, I would sooner you did it above-board." Notice Sibyl's elisions, and how easily understood they seemed to be. Sisters' intercourse is based on concurrent consciousness of the actual; sometimes admitted, sometimes concealed. These two had harboured theirs from the nursery, usually finding speech for them. In the present case they had never spoken quite openly, though each knew the other knew of her knowledge, and pointed allusions to flirtations with married men had been perfectly well understood. Judith has been keeping back a great deal of anger--she has self-control in plenty--to affect a certain patronage of a younger sister; albeit she has only a couple of years more to her half of the fifty they share between them. "Sib dear!" she says. "You are entirely absurd--quite childish. If her jealous ladyship wasn't secure against me and poor good, honourable Stephen, where is married bliss to find security? Unless men and women are never to be friends at all." "Nobody objects to it that I know of. Only not one at a time. You know the difference that makes as well as I do--as well as everyone does." Probably Judith did, and that was why she said nothing--or, at least, in what she did say made no reply to the last assertion, but went back to the general question. She put her hand on the door-handle to suggest peroration and spoke collectedly and coldly. "You are quite wrong, Sibyl, when you use the word 'flirtation' about me and Stephen Lyell. Cordial acquaintance is quite enough--even friendship is a little overstrained. Not but that we are very good friends, and should always keep so, only for that fool of a woman! But I shall always think somebody made mischief." She turned the door-handle to indicate the penultimate character of what was coming, but did not open the door. "And as for this Mr. Alfred Challis or 'Titus Scroop'--who is a person, by-the-bye, with whom any sort of flirtation would be _simply impossible_--he's just a clever playwriter without the slightest pretence to be considered a ... no!--I wasn't going to say gentleman; let me finish ... accustomed to the ways of Society." Sibyl didn't feel convinced, but kept her counsel. "And I have my own reasons for wishing to cultivate his acquaintance."