The young lady, whose brief parley with Alice had simply consisted of the words reported to her master and darling by the old nurse, had known the unpretending little family at Brixton for several years, and had been, for the chief of that number, intimate with Mrs. Streightley and her daughter Ellen. This intimacy, however, was one-sided; Hester Gould was completely in the harmless and unimportant confidence of the two ladies, but they were not in hers. This was no treacherous, insidious distinction, no deliberate preference of other friends, on Hester Gould's part; for she was a woman who gave her confidence to no one; a woman of a self-sufficing nature, and the safest possible confidante, because she never felt sufficiently interested in any one person to betray another for his or her sake. No one could justly accuse Hester Gould of flattery or fawning, yet she induced her acquaintances to conceive enthusiastic friendships for her, and to tell her their most intimate concerns, to discover that she was indispensable to their comfort, and the dearest creature in the world; to declare that they did not know what they should do without her, and that her advice was always the best. How did the girl, without descending to the despicable meanness of toadyism, achieve popularity in her narrow sphere, though she was undeniably handsome, and that too after a fashion that was capable of development into downright beauty of a high type, if circumstances had been more favourable to her? She achieved it by "masterly inactivity." Whether she had thought over the life that lay before her, had formed a philosophy of her own, and decided upon a line of conduct as the result of her meditations, before she left the second-rate boarding-school at Peckham, where she had acquired all the technical education she possessed, it would be impossible to say, and the supposition that she had done so appears unnatural and far-fetched. It was probably partly by the instinct of native shrewdness, and partly by the exercise of precocious powers of observation, that Hester Gould discovered that the great art of making herself agreeable consisted in letting her friends talk to her of themselves, without claiming a reciprocal right. However that may have been, she observed as a rule strict reticence concerning her own affairs, and endured with smiling patience, paying her friends that subtlest of compliments, undivided attention; and displaying interest, which if not demonstrative was practical, in the fullest details concerning theirs. She was of a cold, silent, repressed nature, not exactly unamiable or false; but a woman who might become either under circumstances more disadvantageous than hers were at present, or might expand under favourable and fostering influences into a higher type of womanhood than she either physically or intellectually indicated now.