“‘What next?’ as the tadpole said when his tail dropped off!” cries Daphne, pertly--a remark which, calling their parent’s attention to the edified and cock-eared interest of her innocents, leads to their instant dispersal and flight over the place towards the pre-luncheon wash-pot, which they hoped to have indefinitely postponed. When they are out of sight and earshot. “You came to tell me something?” Mrs. Darcy says, with an entire change of tone. “Though I am not in the habit of watching Rupert and Lavy from an upper chamber, like those graceless brats, I know what it is.” “Then I may spare myself the trouble of telling you,” answers the girl, in a key of constrained and artificial playfulness. Her friend’s kind eyes, worn, yet with the look of a deep, serene contentment underlying their surface fatigue, look at her with a compassionate interrogation. “Are you doing it to please yourself?” she asks in a low voice, yet not hesitatingly. “Whom else?” “It is a motive that has so very seldom guided you,” replies the elder woman, with an enveloping look of motherly solicitude. “And in this kind of case it is the only one that is of the least value; it is the one occasion in life in which it is one’s bounden duty to be absolutely selfish!” “Were you absolutely selfish when you married Mr. Darcy?” asks Lavinia, carrying the war into the enemy’s quarters, and with an apposite recalling of all the sacrifices that her friend--once a very smart London girl--is rumoured by the neighbourhood to have been called upon to make by her choice. “Absolutely,” replies Susan, with the stoutness of the most unmistakable truth. “Everybody belonging to me cried, and said they could not see what I saw in Richard; but _I_ saw what I saw in him, and I knew that that was all that mattered.” “Perhaps _I_ see what I see in Rupert,” replies Lavinia, plucking up her spirit, and detecting a joint in her companion’s harness, though her own voice is not assured. “If you do, of course it is all right,” rejoins the other, unelastically. Lavinia’s head would like to droop, so oppressive is the sense of the cold doubt infiltrated into her own acquiescent serenity; but she forces it to hold itself up against its will. “He is quite aware that we have your disapproval,” she says with a dignity that is native to her; “so much so that he advised me to tell you it was ‘bound to come.’” Mrs. Darcy looks at her sadly; but without either apology or contradiction. “That is just what I do not feel.” “You have always done him scant justice!” cries the girl, stung into hotter partisanship by the chill whisper of a traitor within her own camp. “After all, it is I, not you, that am to marry him.” “Yes, it is you;” in downcast assent. “When you have praised him it has always been in some damning way,” pursues Lavinia, breaking more and more into flame--“saying what a good judge of lace he is, and how well he mended your Bow teapot!” “So he did.”