“Muslin curtains are a mistake in an atmosphere like this of Newcastle!” she thought, “and a parlour-maid should not aim at looking like Madame Sans Gêne.” She was shown into a drawing-room, “stamped with the evidences of culture,” as the interviewer would say, and “redolent of a personality.” Books were scattered about; the piano stood open, with the latest “mood” of the latest fashionable composer lying on it; there were magazines, with paper-knives negligently bisecting their leaves. There were, on the walls, some grim old pictures--family portraits, presumably--of ill-tempered, high-stocked old gentlemen and prim, dignified ladies, but they were interspersed with sundry scratchy and erratic modern etchings and photogravures; there were great bowls of flowers--whose apparent substance, the authoress could not help suspecting, was cleverly eked out with artificial imitations procurable at drapers’ shops. The whole effect was rather pretty and French, and thoroughly out of keeping with the grim realities of Northern hardness and abnegation of art-feeling that reigned outside. A young woman, beautifully dressed, who was sitting over the fire, though it was not cold, rose eagerly to receive her distinguished guest, exclaiming, with the most flattering and heart-felt emphasis, “Oh, Miss Giles, how good of you to come! I was afraid you would have quite forgotten me and my day!” She was a slight woman, not tall, but slender enough to look so. Her eyes were very large and bright, her cheeks, flushed, perhaps with the fire. She made wrinkles when she laughed, but she did not look more than twenty-eight. A little powder, carelessly and innocently cast there, showed on cheeks “hollowed a little mournfully,” as the poet has it. Her hair was arranged in hundreds of little waves and curls, and her dress--Egidia had been in the best houses in Newcastle, during the last few days, but had seen nothing to equal the style and taste of this little solicitor’s wife. Thought and ingenuity had gone to the devising of that gown, but the wearer of it had forgotten to fasten the last two buttons of her sleeve. “The artistic sense strongly developed--but very little power of co-ordination.” So the authoress, taking all these points into consideration and exercising her own professional faculty of classification, mentally assessed her hostess. “This is my day,” Mrs. Elles was assuring her. “I partly hope people will come, and partly not. I would so much rather have you to myself--but then, some of my friends were so anxious to meet you when I said I knew you--so I had to give them a chance--you don’t mind being lionized a little, do you? We can’t help it!”