“Ah, that’s her affair! But it is your other aunts who delight me. Your Aunt Marcia, when I first knew her, was in an ascetic phase. People called it miserliness—but it wasn’t; it was only a moral hatred of waste—in anything. We envied her abominably, when I was a girl in my early teens, much bothered with dressing, because she had invented a garment—the only one of any kind that she wore under her dress. She called it a ‘Unipantaloonicoat’—you can imagine why! It included stockings. It was thin in summer and thick in winter. There was only one putting on—pouf!—and then the dress. I thought it a splendid idea, but my mother wouldn’t let me copy it. Your Aunt Winifred had just the opposite mania—of piling on clothes—because she said there were ‘always draughts.’ If one petticoat fastened at the back, there must be another over that which fastened at the front—and another at the side—and so on, _ad infinitum_. But then, alack!—they suddenly dropped all their absurdities, and became quite ordinary people. Aunt Winifred took to religion; she befriends all the clergy for miles round. She is the mother of Mother Church. And Aunt Marcia, after having starved herself of clothes for years and collected nothing more agreeable than snails, now wears silks and satins, and gossips and goes out to tea, and collects blue china like anybody else. I connect it with the advent of a certain General who after all went off solitary to Malta, and died there. Poor Marcia! But you will certainly have to go and stay there.” “I don’t know!” said Constance, her delicate mouth setting rather stiffly. “Ah, well—they are getting old!” Mrs. Mulholland’s tone had softened again, and when it softened there was a wonderful kindness in it. A door opened suddenly. The Master came in, followed by Alexander Sorell. “My dear Edward!” said Miss Wenlock, “how late you are!” “I was caught by a bore, dear, after chapel. Horace couldn’t get rid of his, and I couldn’t get rid of mine. But now all is well. How do you do, Lady Constance? Have you had enough tea, and will you come and see my books?” He carried her off, Connie extremely nervous, and wondering into what bogs she was about to flounder. But she was a scholar’s daughter, and she had lived with books. She would have scorned to pretend, and her pose, if she had one, was a pose of ignorance—she claimed less than she might. But the Master soon discovered that she had many of her father’s tastes, that she knew something of archæology—he bore it even when she shyly quoted Lanciani—that she read Latin, and was apparently passionately fond of some kinds of poetry. And all the time she pleased his tired eyes by her youth and freshness, and when as she grew at ease with him, and began to chatter to him about Rome, and how the learned there love one another, the Master’s startling, discordant laugh rang out repeatedly. The three in the other room heard it.