She was greatly impressed by Priscilla’s beauty; but more by her way of speaking, and most of all by her manners. Manners with Mrs. Wingfield meant an absence of mannerisms, just as distinction meant nothing that could be seen distinctly, and good taste something that was only known when a breach of it took place. Mrs. Wingfield did not find her deviating from the straight paths of good taste when she referred to her position in relation to the best set of Framsby. She did not boast of not being “received” by these ladies; nor did she sneer at their want of appreciation of her merits. She did not refer to Lady Gainsforth as “the dear Countess” or to Lady Cynthia by her Christian name, to impress upon Mrs. Wingfield the intimacy existing between her and Lady Gainsforth’s daughter. Indeed it was Mrs. Wingfield who introduced these noble names, and Priscilla knew that Mrs. Wingfield’s son must have mentioned them in connection with her own; so she merely said that the skating at Ullerfield Court, the Ullerfields’ place in Norfolk, had been very good indeed when she had stayed there with Lady Cynthia and Katie Ullerfield. And then--also in response to Mrs. Wingfield’s enquiry--she went on to speak of her dairy experience. She thought that on the whole there could be no more interesting work than dairy work. They were in the middle of the dairy when Jack put in an appearance. When they had had tea he took her round the greenhouses. She could talk freely with him on this tour; she had no sense of being restrained by the looming of a grave question ahead. She knew that although two days ago he had been at the point of blurting out something that it would have been impossible for her to reply to satisfactorily then, he would never regard such an incident as the flowering of a yucca in a hothouse as a legitimate excuse for asking her the question which she had restrained. She had no fault to find with him upon this occasion. He talked about the patience of his mother alternately with the bother of orchids and the merits of the Phoenix Barbonica for indoors; and brought her safely back to the drawing-room, where she put a crown upon the good impression she had already produced upon Mrs. Wingfield by showing more than a mere working knowledge of Wedgwood. It so happened that Priscilla had worked up Wedgwood every year to beguile the tedium of her visits to her aunt Emily. The town where her aunt lived contained a museum of the products of the English Etruria, and she had a visiting acquaintance with every piece in the collection. Thus was the good impression which she produced upon Mrs. Wingfield sealed with a Wedgwood medallion. A girl who could wear without reproach a Mechlin lace collar of the best period and who could detect Hackwood’s handiwork on a tiny vase which was attributed to somebody else, could not be far wrong.