That was a funny thing to say to a friend, not to say a relation! We went up into her bedroom, and her old nurse--I suppose it was her nurse, for she wore no cap and bullied her like anything--came forward. "Put me into another gown, Miller!" she said, flopping into a chair. Miller did, putting the skirt over her head as if she had been a child, and even pulling her stockings up for her. Then she had a try at tidying me. "Don't bother. The child's all right. She's so pretty she can wear anything." I think personal remarks rude even if she does think me pretty, but I said nothing. She looked at herself very hard in the glass, and we went down-stairs and got into the motor again. Lady Scilly sat with her hand in mine, and a funny little spot of red on the top of the bone of her cheek that I hadn't noticed there before. It was real. CHAPTER IV We went into a house and into a large empty room with whole streets of coggley chairs and a kind of pulpit thing in the middle. A jug of water and a tumbler stood on it. There was a governessy-looking person present, presiding over this emptiness, whom Lady Scilly immediately began to order about. She was the secretary of the club, and Lady Scilly is a member of the committee. "Where will you sit, Lady Scilly?" said this person, and she asked a good many other questions, using Lady Scilly's name very often. "I shall sit quite at the back this time," Lady Scilly answered. "Too many friends immediately near him might put the lecturer out!" As she said this she looked at me wickedly, but I could not think why. We then went away and read the comic papers for a little until the place had filled. In the reading-room we met a gentleman, who seemed to be a great friend of Lady Scilly's. He spoke to me while she was discussing some arrangement or other with the secretary, who had followed her. "How do you like going about with a fairy?" he asked me. "I'm not," I said. "She's a grown-up woman, old enough to know----" "Worse!" he interrupted me. "She is what I call a fairy!" "What is a fairy?" I asked, though he seemed to me very silly, and only trying to make conversation. "A fairy is a person who always does exactly as she likes--and as other people sometimes don't like." "I see," I said, as usual, although I did not see, as usual, "just as grown-up people do." "But she isn't pretty when she is old! I wonder if you will grow up a fairy? No, I think not, you don't look as if you _could_ tell a lie." "I beg your pardon," I said. He then remarked that Lady Scilly had sent him to take me into the room where the lecture was to be given, and we went. Of course I politely tried to let age go first, but he didn't like that, and said "_Jeunesse oblige_," and "_Place aux dames_," and "_Juniores ad priores_"--every language under the sun, winding up with that silly old story about the polite Lord Stair, who was too polite to hang back and keep the king waiting.