"I will so!" responded Pixie heartily. "It's a very dull party when there's nothing to do but be pleasant. I was bored myself, before I began to eat. I'll leave the ice now, but maybe I'll venture on another by and by.--In black, you said, under the palm?" She flicked a lapful of crumbs on to the floor, and pranced away with her light, dancing step. Geoffrey watched her from the doorway, saw her squeeze herself into the corner of the lounge on which the Duchess was seated, and gaze into her face with the broadest of broad beaming smiles, while the great lady, in her turn, put up a lorgnon and stared back in amazed curiosity. "Well, little girl," said the Duchess, smiling, "and what have you got to say?" "Plenty, thank you! I always have. Me difficulty is to find someone to listen!" replied Miss Pixie, with a confidential nod. The old lady looked extraordinarily thin; the lines on her face crossed and re-crossed like the most intricate puzzle, her lips were sunken, and the tips of nose and chin were at perilously close quarters, but her eyes were young still, such sharp, bright little eyes, and they twinkled just as Pat's did when he was pleased. "Talk to me, then. I'll stop you when I'm bored!" she said, and at that Pixie nodded once again. "Of course. We always do. Jack stamps on me foot, and Pat snores, the same as if he were asleep. He says he is strong enough to hear a tale six times over, but he won't listen to it a seventh, to please man nor woman. Bridgie says jokes are one of the trials of family life, because by the time you've improved the points so that no one would recognise them for the same, your relations won't give you a hearing. It's a curious thing, when you think of it, that you get so exhausted with other people's stories, while you go on laughing at your own. Bridgie says you'll find fifty people to cry with you, for one who will sympathise about jokes. Have you found it that way in your experience?" "Upon my word," cried the Duchess with unction, "this Bridgie appears to be a remarkably sensible young woman! My experience has been that I rarely meet a joke that is not my own exclusive property, to judge by the faces of my companions. Do you happen to possess a name, my youthful philosopher? I should like to know to whom I am talking." "I'm Pixie O'Shaughnessy, and Geoffrey married my sister Esmeralda. He came over to Ireland and fell in love with her in spite of me telling him about her bad temper, thinking of course that he was a perfect stranger. I apologised to him after it was settled and said there was nothing really wrong with her, for she'd always rather be pleasant than not, only at times it's easier to be nasty, and she's been lazy from her youth. The night they met they mistook each other for ghosts, and Esmeralda clung to his arm and screeched for help.