“And, O, my love! the difficulty of housing them! There’s scarce a tradesman in the town that hath not a servant of mine.” Kitty spoke with the careless self-importance of the wealthy woman. And Lady Florence approved. “How right of you, my love, to insist on Comfort!” Comfort was the first and last of her aspirations. “Aye, I will have a little more cream. This whipped stuff--I dare swear ’tis your idea to have it so lavishly flavoured with the vanilla; vastly delicate. Your chocolate is as incomparable as your agreeable self! But yours are not the years of giddiness. I speak in all friendship, I beg you to believe.” Kitty murmured in an absent voice, that she had married her first--worthy Bellairs--a mere child, practically out of the nursery. “Anyhow, my sweet Kilcroney, no woman who has had two husbands can deny a certain amount of experience, and upon rep,” with a rolling laugh, “I don’t care who knows that I’m on the wrong side of thirty! You must be pretty well advanced on the right side of it?” “If you can call twenty-eight----” “Admit to twenty-eight, by all means!--nevertheless, ’tis an age of discretion. And Her Majesty----” “I understand----” said Kitty, balancing her teaspoon on the rim of her handleless cup with a musing air--she wondered in her soul if the excellent Lady Flo could really be taken in by this pretence; if it were possible she did not guess that she, Kitty Kilcroney, was longing, grilling to step into her Court shoes--as if she cared who knew that she was over thirty her last birthday, and warming but to riper beauty as the months slipped by! “’Tis not,” she said aloud, with a pout, “that I would decline a post about our gracious Queen, if ’twere offered me, God forbid! I am too loyal a subject. But I understand the German woman, that frumpish creature, the Keeper of the Robes--what’s her barbarous name?--hath the royal ear, and will not suffer anything young or comely, if she can help it, about Her Majesty--(And there’s one for you, my Lady Flo, with your right and your wrong side of thirty!) ’Tis a vast of pity you will not continue to occupy a position so honourable and so becoming to you.” “To tell you the truth,” said Lady Flora unmoved, helping herself to another macaroon, “’tis the standing that undoes your poor friend! Conceive it, my love, full fourteen stone, and on my feet hours every day. Hours did I say? Centuries. Look hither!” She thrust out a large sandalled foot, which certainly had a plethoric appearance. “’Tis swollen beyond belief. I acknowledge my stoutness. I made but little count of it, for I’ve been a prodigious comfortable woman along of it. ’Tis a cushioned life. It pads the mind as it were. I assure you, I believe myself to have been, only some three months ago, the most good-tempered woman in England. And now! ’Pon rep, I am growing peevish! Fie upon it--stout and peevish! Was there ever such a combination?”