The Honourable Mrs. Keeley was the widow of a peer's son who had been a cabinet minister and had signalised his political career by supporting every bill for the emancipation of women, and his domestic one by impressing upon his wife that her true sphere was the home. The natural reaction followed after his death, when Mrs. Keeley broke loose from the restraint his presence had put upon her, and practised the precepts he had loved to expound in public. She became the most active of political women; she spoke upon platforms; she harried the rate-payers until they elected her favourite county councillor; she canvassed in the slums for the candidate who would vote for woman's suffrage. She had a passion for everything that was modern, irrespective of its value; and she spent the time that was not occupied by her public duties in trying to force her principles upon her only daughter. But Marion Keeley refused to be modern, except in her amusements; she accepted the bicycle and the cigarette with equanimity, but she had no desires to reform anything or anybody; she merely wanted to enjoy herself as much as possible, and she looked forward to making a wealthy marriage in the future. Her greatest ambition was to avoid being bored, and her greatest trial was the energy of her mother. She never pretended to be advanced; and she felt that she had been wasted on the wrong mother when she saw most of the girls of her acquaintance burning to do things in defiance of their old-fashioned parents. She chose her own friends from the idle world of Mayfair; and so it was that two distinct sets of people met in the Keeleys' drawing-room on Thursday afternoons and disapproved of each other. Katharine received a warm reception from her hostess. The fact that she belonged to the class of working gentlewomen, about whom Mrs. Keeley had many theories but little knowledge, was a sufficient evidence of her right to be encouraged; and she found herself seated on an uncomfortable stool, and introduced to an East-end clergyman and a lady inspector of factories within five minutes of her entry into the room. She glanced rather longingly towards the back drawing-room, where her cousin Marion was looking very pretty and was flirting very charmingly with three smart-looking boys; but it was evident that her aunt had labelled her as one of her own set, and she resigned herself to her fate, and agreed with the East-end clergyman that the want of rain was becoming serious. "My niece lectures, you know; strikingly clever, and _so_ young," said Mrs. Keeley in a breathless aside to the lady inspector, as she came back from the opposite side of the room, where she had just coupled a socialist and a guardian of the poor.