Mrs. Higginbotham's aspirations were not of so educational a character. Her literary yearnings were satisfied by the weekly appearance of the _Family Herald Supplement_, to which event she looked forward regularly with great pleasure. That excellent periodical never made its appearance in her drawing-room, although sundry works of fiction from the lending library round the corner, dealing with the habits and customs of the aristocracy, did. Mrs. Higginbotham's father had been a draper in a small way of business, and her husband, beginning life in her father's shop, by the time he died had become a draper in a very large way. Wealth and luxury had been Mrs. Higginbotham's lot for many years, but what she yearned for was the larger, freer life led by those happy beings of whom she read in her chosen novels. To be able to look upon a lord without blinking; to be able to look upon lords every day of your life; to have it said in a newspaper, "I saw Mrs. 'Fluffy' Higginbotham" (Fluffy had been the term of endearment enjoyed by the late Mr. Higginbotham) "sitting under the Achilles Statue in a plum-coloured gown with lettuce-green _revers_;" to have cards of invitation pouring in, every other one illuminated by a title; to regard the London season as something more than the time of year when the days were getting longer and it would soon be time to think about going to the seaside--comfortable as Mrs. Higginbotham's circumstances were, her life had been singularly devoid of these delights. And this was not all. Mrs. Higginbotham was romantic. She revelled in a love-story. She adored the Apollo-like heroes of her favourite fiction with an ungrudging wealth of admiration, and she envied hardly less the blushing heroines on whom they lavished the stores of their magnificent affections. Mrs. Higginbotham felt that it ought to be the lot of every girl to be a blushing heroine at one time of her life. She felt that she herself had been unjustly deprived of that privilege, although she had been an attractive girl, and, if she read the expression in Peter Binney's eyes rightly, was attractive still. The late Mr. Higginbotham had been a good husband to her, but his actual proposal had been of the "Here I am--Take me if you like--If you don't there are plenty that will, and only too glad to get the chance" order. She _had_ taken him, but he had never satisfied the romantic cravings of her nature. She, on her part, had been a good wife to him, but so far as she was aware he had never, from first to last, regarded her as a heroine, or if he had he had never shown it.