On the following Monday too, when the dreaded Lady Florencecourt fulfilled her threat of calling and proved equal to her reputation for unamiability, the young wife was, as she triumphantly averred afterwards, “very good.” The county censor proved to be a fair, florid woman of middle height, rather stout, and with features so commonplace that, without the saving shield of her title, they would have been called common. She had arrogant and capricious manners, an oily self-satisfied voice, and an ill word for everybody. Whenever her husband, who accompanied her on this occasion, ventured to make a remark, she turned to look at him with a resigned air, as if she were used to being made a martyr at the stake of his imbecility. She examined Nouna from head to foot through a gold double eyeglass, as if the young wife had been a charity-girl convicted of misconduct, and made no remark to her except to ask her if she was interested in the Zenana Missions, to which Nouna replied rather haughtily that Indian ladies were no more in need of missionaries than English ones: after which thrust and counter-thrust it may be imagined that the conversation languished, and that later in the day George had great difficulty in persuading his wife not to break off their engagement to go to Willingham. She said it would just spoil the end of their visit to the Millards, for one of whom she had begun to feel a real affection. This was the sharp-tongued Ella, whose intelligence she had the wit to recognise, and whose smart sayings amused her. It was on the evening of a day in the course of which this oddly-assorted pair of friends had been a good deal together that George, on going up stairs to his room after a last cigar with his host, found his wife, not as usual fast asleep like a child, but perched upon the bed in the attitude of a Hindoo idol, with a big book open on her crossed knees, and her eyes fixed upon the nearest candle. “Hallo!” said he, “what’s the matter?” She turned her eyes upon him slowly, with an air of suspicion and curiosity. “Nothing is the matter,” she said gravely, and turning down a whole half-leaf of the book before her to keep the place, she closed it carefully, and handed it to him with an affectation of solemn indifference. “I have been reading,” she added with decision. George looked at the title of the ponderous volume, and observed that it was _The Complete Works of Xenophon_. He opened it without a smile at the page she had turned down, and remarking that it was about half-way through the volume, said she had got on very well if she had read so much in one evening. “I skipped a little--the dry parts,” she observed modestly, but in such a tone that it was impossible for George to tell whether she meant to be taken seriously or not. “Dry!” he exclaimed, raising his eyebrows, “why, he is the very lightest of light reading. Xenophon was the most frivolous man I ever knew; he was at school with me.”