She gave an imperceptible nod which directed his eyes to the thin woman sitting opposite, to whom Harding Watton, a fashionable and fastidious youth, was paying but scant attention. George examined her. "I don't want to," he said shortly; "besides, she would last us no time at all." "Oh!--on the contrary," said Letty, with malice sparkling in her brown eye, "she would last me a good twenty minutes. She has got on my gown." "I didn't recognise it," said George, studying the thin lady again. "I wouldn't mind," said Letty, in the same tone of reflection, "if Mrs. Hawkins didn't think it her duty to lecture me in the intervals of copying my frocks. If I disapproved of anybody, I don't think I should send my nurse to ask their maid for patterns." "I notice you take disapproval very calmly." "Callously, you mean. Well, it is my misfortune. I always feel myself so much more reasonable than the people who disapprove." "This morning, then, you thought me a fool?" "Oh no! Only--well--I _knew_, you see, that I knew better. _I_ was reasonable, and--" "Oh! don't finish," said George, hastily; "and don't suppose that I shall ever give you any more good advice." "Won't you?" Her mocking look sent a challenge, which he met with outward firmness. Meanwhile he was inwardly haunted by a phrase he had once heard a woman apply to the mental capacities of her best friend. "Her _mind_?--her mind, my dear, is a shallow chaos!" The words made a neat label, he scoffingly thought, for his own present sensations. For he could not persuade himself that there was much profundity in his feelings towards Miss Sewell, whatever reckless possibilities life might seem to hold at times; when, for instance, she wore that particular pink gown in which she was attired to-night, or when her little impertinent airs suited her as well as they were suiting her just now. Something cool and critical in him was judging her all the time. Ten years hence, he made himself reflect, she would probably have no prettiness left. Whereas now, what with bloom and grace, what with small proportions and movements light as air, what with an inventive refinement in dress and personal adornment that never failed, all Letty Sewell's defects of feature or expression were easily lost in a general aspect which most men found dazzling and perturbing enough. Letty, at any rate within her own circle, had never yet been without partners, or lovers, or any other form of girlish excitement that she desired, and had been generally supposed--though she herself was aware of some strong evidence to the contrary--to be capable of getting anything she had set her mind upon. She had set her mind, as the spectators in this particular case had speedily divined, upon enslaving young George Tressady. And she had not failed. For even during these last stirring days it had been tolerably clear that she and his election had divided Tressady's mind between them, with a balance, perhaps, to her side.