"Oh, dear! no. It would do, I daresay, if you were in plain clothes; but trains and feathers make fine birds--with all the manners and habits of fine birds. Peacocks couldn't hop about in gutters, and London sparrows couldn't strut across Kensington Gardens, however much they both desired it. So when a woman, in addition to her ordinary best clothes, is attended by twenty-four yards of good satin which ought to be feeding the poor, nothing really abashes her." "I suppose she feels like a queen." "Well, to tell the truth, with her train over her arm and her tulle lappets hanging down her back, she feels like a widow carrying a waterproof; but she thinks she looks like a duchess, and that is a very supporting thought." "Tell me, who is that beautiful woman with the tall soldierly man, coming in now?" said Farquhar. "Oh! those are the Le Mesuriers of Greystone; isn't she divine? And she has the two loveliest little boys you ever saw or imagined. I'm longing to paint them." "She is strikingly handsome." "There is a very strange story about her and her twin sister, which I'll tell you some day." "You shall; but you must tell me all about yourself first, and how you have come to know so much and learn so little." Elisabeth looked round at him quickly. "What do you mean?" "I mean that the depth of your intuition is only surpassed by the shallowness of your experience." "You are very rude!" And Elisabeth drew up her head rather haughtily. "Forgive me; I didn't mean to be; but I was overcome by the wonder of how complex you are--how wise on the one side, and how foolish upon the other; but experience is merely human and very attainable, while intuition is divine and given to few. And I was overcome by another thought; may I tell you what that was?" "Yes; of course you may." "You won't be angry?" "No." "You will remember how we played together as children round the temple of Philae, and let my prehistoric memories of you be my excuse?" "Yes." "I was overcome by the thought of how glorious it would be to teach you all the things you don't know, and how delightful it would be to see you learn them." "Let us go into the next room," said Elisabeth, rising from her seat; "I see Lady Silverhampton nodding to me, and I must go and speak to her." Cecil Farquhar bent his six-foot-one down to her five-foot-five. "Are you angry with me?" he whispered. "I don't know; I think I am." "But you will let me come and see you, so that you may forgive me, won't you?" "You don't deserve it." "Of course I don't; I shouldn't want it if I did. The things we deserve are as unpleasant as our doctor's prescriptions. Please let me come--because we knew each other all those centuries ago, and I haven't forgotten you." "Very well, then. You'll find my address in the Red Book, and I'm always at home on Sunday afternoons."