‘Ah! but you haven’t read it,’ she said regretfully. ‘It was when I was Maid of Honor, you know. No Maid of Honor had ever written a novel before. It was quite an event. Dear Prince Albert borrowed a copy of me one night to read in bed--I have it still, with the page turned down where he left-off.’ She hesitated. ‘It was only in the second chapter,’ she said at last with a fine truthfulness, ‘but you know he was so busy, all the Queen’s work to do, of course, besides his own--poor man!’ Robert implored her to lend him the work, and Mrs. Darcy, with blushes which made her more weird than ever, consented. Then there was a pause, filled by an acid altercation between Lady Charlotte and her husband, who had not found Rose as grateful for his attentions as, in his opinion, a pink and white nobody, at a country dinner-party ought to be, and was glad of the diversion afforded him by some aggressive remark of his wife. He and she differed on three main points: politics; the decoration of their London house, Sir. Wynnstay being a lover of Louis Quinze, and Lady Charlotte a preacher of Morris; and the composition of their dinner-parties. Lady Charlotte in the pursuit of amusement and notoriety, was fond of flooding the domestic hearth with all the people possessed of any sort of a name for any sort of a reason in London. Mr. Wynnstay loathed such promiscuity; and the company in which his wife compelled him to drink his wine had seriously soured a small irritable Conservative with more family pride than either nerves or digestion. During the whole passage of arms, Mrs. Darcy watched Elsmere, cat-and-mouse fashion, with a further confidence burning within her, and as soon as there was once more a general burst of talk, she pounced upon him afresh. Would he like to know that after thirty years she had just finished her _second_ novel, unbeknown to her brother--as she mentioned him the little face darkened, took a strange bitterness--and it was just about to be entrusted to the post and a publisher? Robert was all interest, of course, and inquired the subject. Mrs. Darcy expanded still more--could, in fact, have hugged him. But, just as she was launching into the plot a thought, apparently a scruple of conscience, struck her. ‘Do you remember,’ she began, looking at him a little darkly, askance, ‘what I said about my hobbies the other day? Now, Mr. Elsmere, will you tell me--don’t mind me--don’t be polite--have you ever heard people tell stories of me? Have you ever, for instance, heard them call me a--a--tuft-hunter?’ ‘Never! ‘said Robert heartily.