"Come in and talk to me," Mrs. Meares would say. "I'm just tidying up my bedroom. Ah, Sil, if God had not willed otherwise I should have had a boy just your age now. Poor little innocent!" Sylvia knew too well this counterpart of hers and hated him as much in his baby's grave as she might have done were he still her competitor in life. "Ah, it's a terrible thing to be left as I've been left, to be married and not married, to have been a mother and to have lost my child. And I was never intended for this life. My father kept horses. We had a carriage. But they say, 'trust an Irishwoman to turn her hand to anything.' And it's true. There's many people would wonder how I do it with only one maid. How's your dear father? He seems comfortable. Ah, it's a privilege to look after a gentleman like him. He seems to have led a most adventurous life. Most of his time spent abroad, he tells me. Well, travel gives an air to a man. Ah, now if one of the cats hasn't been naughty just when I'd got my room really tidy! Will you tell Clara, if you are going down-stairs, to bring up a dustpan? I don't mind asking you, for at your age I think you would be glad to wait on the ladies like a little gentleman. Sure, as your father said the other day, it's a very good thing you're in a lady's house. That's why the dear baron's so content; and the poor man has much to try him, for his relations in Berlin have treated him abominably." Such speeches inflicted upon her because Monkley wanted to talk secrets with her father made her disapprove of Monkley. Nevertheless, she admired him in a way; he was the only person in the house who was not limp, except Mr. Morgan, the pianist; but he used to glare at her, when they occasionally met, and seemed to regard her as an unpleasant result of being late for breakfast, like a spot on the table-cloth made by a predecessor's egg. Monkley used to ask Sylvia sometimes about what she was going to do. Naturally he treated her future as a boy's future, which took most of the interest out of the conversation; for Sylvia did not suppose that she would be able to remain a boy very much longer. The mortifying fact, too, was that she was not getting anything out of her transformation: for all the fun she was having, she might as well have stayed a girl. There had been a brief vista of liberty at Pomona Terrace; here, beyond going out to buy a paper or tobacco for her father, she spent most of her time in gossiping with Clara, which she could probably have done more profitably in petticoats.