"Just you wait till I come out, Miss May." She said one day, "and then see if your airs and graces will keep me in the background! The fact is, you’re afraid to show off against me; you know as well as I do that, with all your fine dress and your finer airs, you are not half so much noticed as I am! And as for that Sarah----" "Leave Sarah out of it!" laughed May; "she doesn’t want to go." "I’d soon stop it if she did!" growled Flossie. It was really very hard, and Flossie thought and said so. But May was inflexible, and long before Flossie was ready to come out May became engaged to be married. It was a very brilliant marriage indeed, and the entire family were wonderfully elated about it. True, the bridegroom was a good deal older than May, and was pompous to a degree. But then he was enormously rich, and had a great cheap clothes manufactory down the East End somewhere, and could give May bigger diamonds than anybody they knew. He had, too, a house in Palace Gardens and a retinue of silk-stockinged servants, in comparison with whom Mrs. George’s footman at Brighton was a mere country clod. So in time May was married--married with such pomp and ceremony that feelings seemed left out altogether, and if tender-hearted Mrs. Stubbs shed a few tears at parting with the first of all her brood, they were smothered among the billows of lace which bedecked her, and nobody but herself was any the wiser. After this it became an established custom that Flossie should take May’s place in the carriage; and it was not long before she managed to persuade her mother that it was time for her to throw off Miss Best’s yoke altogether, and go out as a young lady of fashion. Before very long Mrs. Stubbs began dearly to repent herself of her weakness; for Flossie, with her emancipation, seemed to have left her old self in the schoolroom, and to have taken up a new character altogether. She became very refined, very fashionable, very elegant in all her ideas and desires. "My mother really is a great trial to me," she said one day to Sarah. "She’s very good, and all that, you know; but she’s so--well, there’s no sort of style about poor mother. And it is trying to have to take men up and introduce them to her. And they look at her, don’t you know, as if she were something new, something strange--as if they hadn’t seen anything like her before. It’s annoying, to say the least of it." "Well, if I were you," retorted Sarah hotly, "I should say to such people, and pretty sharply, ’If my mother is not good enough for you, why, neither am I.’" "But then, you see, I am," remarked Flossie, with ineffable conceit. "You don’t understand what I mean," said Sarah, with a patient sigh.