“Honor Sturgis is extraordinarily nice too, isn’t she?” Rose continued. “Don’t you like the way she talks? She has the kind of voice that reminds you of that speech in _King Lear_. Don’t you love gentle voices, Dombeen? She is tall, too. I believe she’s only an inch shorter than you. It’s absurd when husbands are immense and their wives little, isn’t it?” You see what an imp she could be! “Honor is writing a description of a visit to Chamounix,” Rose went on. “I don’t know what the Lowcester Literary Society would do if the Sturgises hadn’t come to liven it up.” “We got on very well before they arrived,” I replied. “Miss Sturgis was in the garden,” Rose continued. “She’s wonderful with flowers, they say. If she just put a walking-stick into the ground it would grow. I expect that you and she together would have the most stunning garden in the world. And she’s not really old, not more than thirty-eight. Don’t you think that married people should be nearly of an age? Some day, when I have enough courage, I shall ask Honor—she’s the easiest, I think—why they’ve never married. With all their money, too! But Quaker girls often don’t, I believe. It’s funny, because I should think they’d make wonderful wives, so placid and sensible, don’t you know. What do you think, Dombeen?” “I’m sick of the whole subject,” I replied. * * * * * Eustace was exhibited not only to me—and, I am aware that, to ordinary prospective bridegrooms, these probationary visits (probationary, but too late for remedy) must be a very trying ordeal and we ought not to be too hard—but to the Strattons. What Rose’s cousins thought of him I have no means of knowing, but I suppose that girls are as critical of other girls’ fiancés as we can be of the young women whom our friends so mistakenly believe to be Minervas or Venuses. But Mrs. Stratton, even if she may have had a touch of envious regret that Eustace had not first seen her daughters and fallen to one of them, was pleased with her new nephew. Or so I gathered from a letter to me in which she congratulated me upon Rose’s alliance with so promising a counsel and so worthy and seemly a man, and went on to refer with satisfaction to the cessation of unfortunate rumours which the engagement would bring about. Eustace, I found, liked her, and had remonstrated with Rose, but with infinite patience, about her antipathy to the lady. It was her first disappointment in him.