“Eh, gud, your ladyship, do not tell me that you would bury so much beauty among sheep and cows, and odious ploughmen’s wives and dairy-women. A month or so of rustic life in summer between Epsom and Tunbridge Wells may be well enough, to rest your beauty—without patches or a French head—out of sight of your admirers. But to live in the country! Only a jealous husband could ever propose more than an annual six weeks of rustic seclusion to a wife under sixty. Lord Chesterfield was considered as cruel for taking his Countess to the rocks and ravines of Derbyshire as Sir John Denham for poisoning his poor lady.” “Chut! tu vas un peu trop loin, Lewin!” remonstrated Lady Fareham. “But, in truly, your ladyship, when I hear Mrs. Kirkland talk of a husband who would have her waste her beauty upon clod-polls and dairy-maids, and never wear a mantua worth looking at——” “I doubt my husband will be guided by his own likings rather than by Mrs. Lewin’s tastes and opinions,” said Angela, with a stately curtsy, which was designed to put the forward tradeswoman in her place, and which took that personage’s breath away. “There never was anything like the insolence of a handsome young woman before she has been educated by a lover,” she said to her ladyship’s Frenchwoman, with a vindictive smile and scornful shrug of bloated shoulders, when the sisters had left the parlour. “But wait till her first intrigue, and then it is ‘My dearest Lewin, wilt thou make me everlastingly beholden to thee by taking this letter—thou knowest to whom?’ Or, in a flood of tears, ‘Lewin, you are my only friend—and if you cannot find me some good and serviceable woman who would give me a home where I can hide from the cruel eye of the world, I must take poison.’ No insolence then, mark you, Madame Hortense!” “This demoiselle is none of your sort,” Hortense said. “You must not judge English ladies by your maids of honour. Celles là sont des drôlesses, sans foi ni loi.” “Well, if she thinks I am going to make up linsey woolsey, or Norwich drugget, she will find her mistake. I never courted the custom of little gentlemen’s wives, with a hundred a year for pin-money. If I am to do anything for this stuck-up peacock, Lady Fareham must give me the order. I am no servant of Madame Kirkland.” Alone in the garden, the sisters embraced again, Lady Fareham with a fretful tearfulness, as of one whose over strung nerves were on the verge of hysteria. “There is something that preys upon your spirits, dearest,” Angela said interrogatively. “Something! A hundred things. I am at cross purposes with life. But I should have been worse had you been obstinate and still refused this gentleman.” “Why should that affect you, Hyacinth?” asked her sister, with a sudden coldness.