The mother rises hastily, and disappears, rustling, jingling, weeping through a handsome mahogany door into a Maple boudoir, just as another handsome mahogany door opens to admit the subject of the late conversation into the room whence her advent has chased her parent. “You have been hearing of my crime?” says she, coming in and shaking hands conceitedly high up in the air. Féodorovna Prince is a prettyish girl, long and reedy, with a skin, hair, and hands whose merits make the casual looker forgive the thumblike shape of her nose and the washiness of her foolish eyes. “Yes, I have.” “And what is your opinion of it?” “I think I had rather not say.” Miss Prince is standing before the fireplace, a hand on each side of her phenomenally long eighteen-inch waist. “You need not be afraid of hurting my feelings,” she says, with a self-satisfied smile. “I do not think I am at all afraid of that.” Féodorovna ceases to smile, but continues to balance herself gracefully. “I was born quite unlike other people! I have always been keenly conscious of that. I have a right and wrong of my own; and they are not the conventional ones.” Lavinia listens in ireful silence; but no one glancing at the conflagration in her eyes could mistake her speechlessness for approval. “You asked General ---- to marry you?” she says, with a point-blankness that would be pitiless, were there any question of a need for compassion. But Féodorovna does not wince. “I did not put it quite so crudely as that!”--with a slightly superior smile. “I told him that I loved and reverenced him beyond all created beings, and that I was his to do what he willed with!” “And he did not will to do anything?” replies Lavinia, brutally. Her stinging speech scarcely raises the colour in Miss Prince’s faint cheeks. “He treated me with the same perfect loyalty that I had treated him!” Lavinia’s answer is impatiently to pull open her own fur collar, as if she were choking, and to repeat, half under her breath with a species of snort-- “_Loyalty!_” The other girl sits slowly down upon the Aubusson hearthrug, taking her small knees into the embrace of her lengthy arms, and looking straight before her. “Would you like to see his letter?”--lifting one hand towards the breast of her gown. The indication of what delicate lodging has been provided for the hard-hearted hero’s missive adds vigour to Miss Carew’s emphatic negative. “I had far rather not.” Féodorovna’s thin pale hand drops to her side. “I want every one to see it!” she says. “I want every one to know that if I have loved unhappily, I have loved worthily--have loved the noblest object that ever ‘swam into my ken’!” The self-satisfied bravado has gone out of her face and manner; and as she lifts her rather colourless eyes to the ceiling, as if expecting to see her General sitting enthroned among the planets, Miss Carew realizes with enhanced consternation that she is in deadly, _deadly_ earnest.