In their first quarter of an hour together over the drawing-room teacups Helen was amused, irritated, surprised, confounded by the calm assumptions of Lady Elizabeth Endor. All her standards of life and conduct were based on a rather remote past. John, who had humor enough to make due allowance for the old lady’s antique flavor, had done his best to prepare Helen for a shock; all the same, a lively sense of the comic was needed in Helen herself to make tolerable that first evening at Wyndham. Not the least trying circumstance was Lady Elizabeth’s complete and resolute charge of the patient. If he were able to get a good night’s rest and his cut and bruised head became no worse, he might be allowed “up” for a short time on the morrow. Meanwhile, no one, not even his affianced, must venture to disturb the peace of his chamber. Helen liked not the ukase but she had to submit. She had also to submit to dressing for dinner in a fireless but moldily magnificent bedroom. Moldy magnificence seemed, in fact, to be the note of that cheerless house. It even extended to the dinner itself. Long before that function was through, Helen felt that it was the most depressing and unsatisfying meal she had ever eaten. Behind the old lady’s chair was a solemn pontiff in the form of a butler: a lord in waiting to a lady in waiting to Good Queen Victoria. A lovely bit of mahogany was before them; wonderful old silver, fine napery and divers articles of “bigotry and virtue” that excited Helen’s cupidity, lay all around; and yet the whole scheme had such an air of historical solidity that it might have come from Madame Tussaud’s, the Wallace Collection, or the Ark. The fare was so scant that Helen would have had qualms about taking a full share had not her hostess appeared to subsist on hot water and dry toast. Moreover, it was ill cooked, sauceless, uninspired; and although claret was offered with an air that conferred the monarchy of all vintages upon it, the guest regretted that she had not been content with a humble but safe alternative in the form of barley water. So much for the meal. As for the spirit which informed it, Helen soon found that it was hopeless for a mere “American newspaper person” of no particular social credentials, to penetrate the _chevaux de frise_ of Lady Elizabeth’s class consciousness. To begin with, judging by a stray remark the old woman let fall, it seemed a source of mild surprise to find that “an American” was not necessarily “a nigger” and that “a newspaper person” was not necessarily “a printer.” All the same, when the best had been said and every allowance made for the march of progress for any woman to be actively engaged in earning her own living was to place her in the governess category if not actually to consign her to the lower depths with Mossop the butler, and his highly trained subordinates, Charles and John.