"I will give you a rough outline of my cousin, and leave the details to your vivid imagination. She is very kind, very pious, very narrow, and very dull." "_Good Lord deliver us!_" murmured Lucy gravely. "And the shop?" "The shop is awful. You can imagine nothing worse than the truth." "A nice sphere for Mona Maclean!" "Oh, my dear, there is sphere enough in all conscience--only too much sphere! I never saw so clearly in my life before that nothing depends on what a man does, but that everything depends on how he does it. Even that twopenny-halfpenny shop might be made a centre of culture and taste and refinement for the whole neighbourhood." "You would have to get rid of your cousin first." "I don't know. One would rather have quite a free hand. But she is wonderfully liberal about things that must seem sheer nonsense to her." "She well may be!" "That is absurd. Why should she pay in appreciation for qualities that she does not in the least want, and would rather be without? You must not judge of my suitability to her by my suitability to--you, for instance." "Then she does not even appreciate you?" Mona meditated before replying. "She likes me," she said, "but she thinks me absurdly 'superior' one minute, and gratuitously frivolous the next. She has not got hold of the main thread of my character, so of course she thinks me a bundle of inconsistencies." "Why do you stay?" Mona sighed. "We won't go into that, dear. I have committed myself. Besides, my cousin likes me; she was very unwilling to part with me, even for a week." "Selfish brute!" said Lucy inconsistently. "Is there any society?" "No; but if there were, it would consider itself a cut above me." "Any men?" There was a momentary pause. "My dear, do I ever know anything about the men in a place?" "I was hoping you had started a few of your Platonic friendships. They would at least save you from moping to death." "Moping to death!" said Mona, springing to her feet "My dear child, I never was farther from that in my life. I botanise, and once in a way I meet some of the greatest living scientists. I do the best sketches I ever did in my life, and I have developed a greater talent for millinery than you can even conceive!" CHAPTER XXV. A VOICE IN THE FOG. A dense fog hung over the city. Doris and Mona had spent half the day among the shops and stores, and Mona was in a glow of satisfaction. She was convinced that no human being had ever made a ten-pound note go so far before, and it was with difficulty that she could be induced to talk of anything else. Doris was much amused. She believed in letting people "gang their ain gait," and a day with Mona was worth having under most conditions; but how any intelligent human being could elect to spend it so, was more than she could divine.