Now, however, she was in London, whither she had gone for a few days on her way home, to meet Rose and to shop. Robert’s opinion was that all women, even St. Elizabeths, have somewhere rooted in them an inordinate partiality for shopping; otherwise why should that operation take four or five mortal days? Surely with a little energy, one might buy up the whole of London in twelve hours! However, Catherine lingered, and as her purchases were made, Robert crossly supposed it must all be Rose’s fault. He believed that Rose spent a great deal too much on dress. Catherine’s letters, of course, were full of her sister. Rose, she said, had come back from Berlin handsomer than ever, and playing, she supposed magnificently. At any rate, the letters which followed her in shoals from Berlin flattered her to the skies, and during the three months preceding her return, Joachim himself had taken her as a pupil and given her unusual attention. ‘And now, of course,’ wrote Catherine, ‘she is desperately disappointed that mamma and Agnes cannot join her in town, as she had hoped. She does her best, I know, poor child, to conceal it and to feel as she ought about mamma, but I can see that the idea of an indefinite time at Burwood is intolerable to her. As to Berlin, I think she has enjoyed it, but she talks very scornfully of German _Schwärmerei_ and German women, and she tells the oddest stories of her professors. With one or two of them she seems to have been in a state of war from the beginning; but some of them, my dear Robert, I am persuaded were just simply in love with her! ‘I don’t--no, I never _shall_ believe, that independent, exciting student’s life is good for a girl. But I never say so to Rose. When she forgets to be irritable and to feel that the world is going against her, she is often very sweet to me, and I can’t bear there should be any conflict.’ His next day’s letter contained the following:-- ‘Are you properly amused, sir, at your wife’s performances in town? Our three concerts you have heard all about. I still can’t get over them. I go about haunted by the _seriousness_, the life and death interest people throw into music. It is astonishing! And outside, as we got into our hansom, such sights and sounds!--such starved, fierce-looking men, such ghastly women! ‘But since then Rose has been taking me into society. Yesterday afternoon, after I wrote to you, we went to see Rose’s artistic friends--the Piersons--with whom she was staying last summer, and to-day we have even called on Lady Charlotte Wynnstay.