"At least, Septimus," says the apex of the departing skirts, "you will remember what is due to yourself and your family--_I_ am nobody--so far as not to encourage the girl in resisting her mother's authority." And, receiving no reply, departs, and is heard on the landing rejecting insufficient reasons why the drugget will not lay flat. And presently issuing a mandate to an upper landing: "Your father wishes to speak to you in his library. _I_ wish you to go." The last words not to seem to abdicate as Queen Consort. Laetitia isn't a girl whom we find new charms in after making her mother's acquaintance. You know how some young people would be passable enough if it were not for a lurid light thrown upon their identity by other members of their family. You know the sister you thought was a beauty and dear, until you met her sister, who was gristly and a jade. But it's a great shame in Tishy's case, because we do honestly believe her seeming _da capo_ of her mother is more skirts than anything else. We credit their respective _apices_ with different dispositions, although (yes, it's quite true what you say) we don't see exactly from what corner of the Professor's his daughter got her better one. He's all very well, but.... Anyhow, we are sorry for Tishy now, as she comes uneasily into the library to be "spoken to." She comes in buttoning a glove and saying, "Yes, papa." She was evidently just going out--probably arrested by the voices in the library. "Well, my dear, your mother wishes me to speak to you.... H'm! h'm! By-the-bye," he interrupts himself, "it really is a very extraordinary thing, but it's just like work-people. A man spends all his life laying carpets, and the minute he lays mine it's too big or too small." "The man outside? He's very tiresome. He says the passage is an unusual size." "I should have taken that point when I measured it. It seems to me late in the day now the carpet's made up. However, that's neither here nor there. Your mother wishes me to--a--to speak to you, my dear." "What does she want you to say, papa?" "H'm--well!--it's sometimes not easy to understand your mother. I cannot say that I have gathered precisely what it is she wishes me to say. Nor am I certain that I should be prepared to say it if I knew what it was."--Tishy brightened perceptibly.--"But I am this far in sympathy with what I suppose to be her meaning"--Tishy's face fell--"that I should be very sorry to hear that you had made any binding promises to any young gentleman without knowing more of his antecedents and connexions than I suppose you do at the present about this--a--musical friend of yours--without consulting me." The perfunctory tone in which he added, "and your mother," made the words hardly worth recording.