And now (while Lucia was resting calmly on Mr. Rickman's sofa), in the grave and beautiful drawing-room of the old brown house at Hampstead a refined and fastidious little lady walked up and down in a state of high nervous excitement. That little lady bore in her slight way a remarkable resemblance to her brother Horace. It was Horace in petticoats, diminutive and dark. There was the same clearness, the same distinction of feature, the same supercilious forehead, the same quivering of the high-bred nose, the same drooping of the unhappy mouth. Bat the flame of Edith's small steel black eyes revealed a creature of more ardour and more energy. At the moment Edith was visited with severe compunction; an intrusive uncomfortable feeling that she had never before been thus compelled to entertain. For looking back upon the past two years she perceived that her conduct as mistress of that drawing-room and house had not always been as fastidious and refined as she could wish. The house and the drawing-room were mainly the cause of it. Before Horace became editor of _The Museion_, Edith had been mistress of a minute establishment kept up with difficulty on a narrow income. In a drawing-room seventeen feet by twelve she received with difficulty a small circle of the cultured; ladies as refined and fastidious as herself, and (after superhuman efforts on the part of these ladies) occasionally a preoccupied and superlatively married man. From this position, compatible with her exclusiveness, but not with her temperament or her ambition, Edith found herself raised suddenly to a perfect eminence of culture and refinement as head of the great editor's house. She held a sort of salon, to which her brother's reputation attracted many figures if possible more distinguished than his own. She found herself the object of much flattering attention on the part of persons anxious to stand well with Horace Jewdwine. With a dignity positively marvellous in so small a woman, her head held high and made higher still by the raised roll of her black hair, Edith reigned for three years in that long drawing-room. She laid down the law grandiloquently to the young aspirants who thronged her court; she rewarded with superb compliments those who had achieved. Happily for Edith those gentlemen were masters of social legerdemain; and they conveyed their smiles up the sleeves of their dress-coats adroitly unperceived.