"It was not twaddle. It was very serious. It was on a day when I found you looking worried and absent, unable to appreciate either Mrs. Wornock's music or my conversation; and, on being closely questioned, you confessed that the canker at your heart was dinner. The General had been dissatisfied; the cook was stupid. You had done your uttermost. You had devoted hours to the reading of cookery-books, which seemed all of them hopelessly alike. You had studied all his fancies. You had given him Bombay ducks with his curry----" "Did I say all that? How silly of me. And how ridiculous of you to remember." "Memory is not a paid servant, but a most capricious Ariel. One cannot say to one's self, I will remember this or that. My memory is as fugitive as most people's; but there is one thing for which it can be relied on. I remember everything about you--all you say to me, all you do--even to the gowns you wear." Suzette laughed a little and blushed a little; but did not look offended. "You had about five minutes' talk with my mother before I took you to see the enamels. How do you like her?" "Immensely! Lady Emily is charming. She was telling me about her white farm." "It would have been odd if you had escaped hearing of that, even in the first five minutes." "I was deeply interested. Lady Emily has promised me some white bramahs. I am going to start a white poultry-yard. I cannot aspire higher than poultry; but I am determined that every bird shall be white." "Pretty foolishness! And so you like my mother?" "Very, very much. She is one of those people with whom one feels at one's ease from the first moment. She looks as if she could not say or even think anything unkind." "I don't believe she could do either. And yet she is human--feminine-human--and can enjoy an interesting scandal--local, if possible. She enjoys it passively. She does nothing to swell the snowball, and will hardly help to roll it along. She remains perfectly passive, and never goes further than to say that she is shocked and disappointed. And yet I believe she enjoys it." "It is only the excitement that one enjoys. We had scandals even in the convent--girls who behaved badly, dishonourably, about their studies; cheating in order to get a better chance of a prize. I'm afraid we were all too deeply interested in the crime and the punishment. It was something to think about and talk about when life was particularly monotonous." Lady Emily was watching them from the other side of the table, and lending rather an indifferent ear to Mr. Roebuck's account of Homburg and the people he and his wife had met there. They had only just returned from that exhilarating scene. He could talk of nothing but H.R.H.'s condescension; the dear duchess; Lady this, Lord the other; and the prodigious demand there had been for himself and his wife in the very smartest society.