At no time had Giovanna been a loquacious woman, and it was not likely that she would willingly allow the people among whom she now mixed to discover how terribly ignorant she was about many of the subjects on which they talked so glibly. She had naturally good manners, and had been well trained by her English mother as long as that mother had lived, besides which she had excellent taste in dress, all of which told in her favour. But, when it became a question of something beyond manners and dress, Giovanna knew that, for her own credit’s sake, her part in the social comedy must to all intents and purposes be a silent one. Her place was to listen to everybody with smiling courtesy, and to look as if she felt an intelligent interest in all that was talked about, but to say as little as possible in return; and, above all, unless driven into a corner, never to originate any proposition of her own. It was precisely here that she found Mrs. Tew so invaluable. That lady proved herself a person of infinite tact and resource. Whenever there seemed a risk of Mrs. Clare being drawn into a conversation about matters concerning which, as the canon’s widow surmised, she was probably more or less ignorant, she, Mrs. Tew, came boldly to her rescue, and by means of some apposite remark or pertinent question, addressed directly to some other person in the company, contrived, to attract the current of talk to herself, or else to deflect it into some less dangerous channel. Giovanna was sufficiently clear-sighted to see through Mrs. Tew’s object, and was proportionately grateful; not being like some of her sex, who would have been more than annoyed at finding that their paid dependent had taken upon herself to gauge their ignorance, and had had the impertinence to assume that their educational acquirements were not on a par with those of the people with whom, for anything the said dependent was supposed to know to the contrary, they had been in the habit of mixing from youth upward. But whatever her faults in other directions might be, Giovanna had no false pride about her, and was not afflicted with any deficiency of common-sense.