"Dear Mrs Centum," said Lucilla sweetly, "one has always to do one's duty to society. As far as I am concerned, it is quite different. And I don't mean to say that the officers would not be a great acquisition," Miss Marjoribanks continued, with her usual politeness; "but then too many young people are the ruin of society. If we were to run all to dancing and that sort of thing, after all the trouble one has taken----" said Lucilla. Perhaps it was not quite civil; but then it must be admitted, that to see a man look blankly in your face as if he were saying in his mind, "Then it is only _you_, and not that pretty little thing, that is Miss Marjoribanks!" was about as exasperating a sensation as one is likely to meet with. Lucilla understood perfectly well General Travers's look, and for the moment, instead of making herself agreeable, it was the contrary impulse that moved her. She looked at him, not blankly as he looked at her, but in a calmly considerate way, as she might have looked at Mr Holden the upholsterer, had he proposed a new kind of _tapisserie_ to her judgment. "One would be always delighted, of course, to have General Travers," said Miss Marjoribanks, "but I am afraid the officers would not do." As for Mrs Centum, she was quite incapable of managing such a terrible crisis. She felt it, indeed, a little hard that it should be her man who was defied in this alarming way, while Mr Cavendish and the Archdeacon, the two previous candidates, had both been received so sweetly. To be sure, it was his own fault; but that did not mend matters. She looked from one to the other with a scared look, and grew very red, and untied her bonnet; and then, as none of these evidences of agitation had any effect upon the other parties involved, plunged into the heat of the conflict without considering what she was about to say. "Lucilla, I am surprised at you," said Mrs Centum, "when you know how you have gone on about Mr Cavendish--when you know what a fuss you have made, and how you have told everybody----" "By the bye, who is Mr Cavendish?" said General Travers, interposing, with that holy horror of a quarrel between women which is common to the inferior half of creation. "I wonder if he is a fellow one used to meet everywhere. One never could get any satisfaction who he belonged to. He never pretended to be one of the Devonshire Cavendishes, you know. I don't know if he had any family at all, or relations, or that sort of thing. In most cases a man gets on just as well without them, in my opinion. I wonder if this fellow you are talking of is he?"