"Must we?" said Mrs. Whittaker, with a superior smile. "Ah, I see that you and I, dear Mrs. M'Quade, must agree to differ. Let me give you some tea. I assure you it is quite conventional tea." "Thank you very much," said Mrs. M'Quade, smiling. In retailing the conversation to her husband that evening, Mrs. M'Quade remarked that it was quite conventional tea. "I should think about one-and-twopence a pound," was her comment. "And how did you like the lady?" her husband asked. "She is an extraordinary woman, a very extraordinary woman. I don't know that I like her; on the other hand, I don't know whether there is anything about her to dislike." "What age--what size--what sort of a woman is she?" he asked. "In age something over forty; in person plump and rather comely. A large, solid woman, with no idea of making the best of herself. She had a tea-gown on to-day that would have made the very angels weep." "Would any tea-gown make the angels weep?" "I think that one would. It was a dingy brown and a salmon-pink. Wherever it was brown you wished it was salmon-pink, and wherever it was salmon-pink you wished it was brown, except when you were wishing that it was black altogether, without any relief at all." "Dear me! What was it like?" "Well, it was just the one garment that she should never have worn. She wears old-fashioned stays, and though people may think they don't matter in a tea-gown, I think stays have more effect on the general cut of a tea-gown than they have on any other garment. I should like to have dressed that lady in a plain coat and skirt from my own tailor, with a loose white front, and a good black hat. But I don't think anybody would know her." "Well, it's no business of yours, little woman," said the doctor, cheerily. "And, after all, it's a new family--children--infantile diseases--servants--people apparently thoroughly well-to-do. Bought the house--done it up inside and out. It isn't for you and I to quarrel with our bread and butter." CHAPTER IV SKATING ON THIN ICE Was it, I wonder, a mother who first evolved the proverb: "Where ignorance is bliss 'twere folly to be wise"? It cannot be said that as a family the inhabitants of Ye Dene were a success at Northampton Park. I have already said that they made friends slowly, and in saying so I was of course speaking of Mr. and Mrs. Whittaker and not of the children. The children, on the contrary, made friends very quickly and as quickly got through them. I doubt indeed if two more unpopular children had ever attended the Northampton Park High School. Fortunately for them, I mean for their peace of mind as the time went by, Mrs. Whittaker was not aware of the real reason for this state of affairs. "I hear," she remarked one day to long-legged Maud, who had been for a couple of years advanced to the dignity of a pigtail, "I hear that Gwendoline Hammond had a party yesterday."