Heaven and earth! the duplicity of women!--he thought as he passed along the sunny Paris streets with a heart as heavy as lead in his breast. His sister, his blue-eyed Sourisette, his favorite from her nursery days, was no better than a thief! No better than any wretched woman of the streets whose _souteneur_ might strike him with a knife in the gloaming that evening! From Beaumont’s he went to Boussod et Valadon’s, and after an interview with that famous firm, returned to his favorite place of Faldon, where he had a small collection of old Flemish and Dutch pictures brought together in the previous century by his great-grandfather. They were not in the entail, and he had always been at liberty to sell them, but he had never been tempted to do so, for he was attached to the paintings and he liked to see them hanging in the oval room with a north light, where they had been for over a hundred years. He abhorred selling things, all his economies had been effected without selling anything: only by refraining from buying, which is an unpopular method. Dilettanti and dealers had all alike hinted to him that those pictures were worth a great deal, and that it was a pity to keep them in a secluded country place on the edge of the Atlantic. But he had always turned a deaf ear to such suggestions. Now, he said to himself, the pictures must go. He had nothing else in his possession which would fetch a tenth part of his sister’s debt to William Massarene. He was even afraid that the pictures would fail to realize the whole amount. But he asked for that amount and after some demur the price was accepted, the pictures were well known, and the money would be paid down, on their delivery in Ireland, to the agent of the great Paris house. It was a matter easily concluded; but one which cut him to the quick. However rapidly and privately it had been arranged the facts of the sale would not, he knew, be kept out of the newspapers. Paragraphs would appear in all the social and artistic journals to the effect that Lord Hurstmanceaux had sold his Dutch and Flemish collections of _petits maîtres_. Every misfortune is nowadays doubled and trebled by the publicity given to it in the press, which turns the knife in our wounds and pours petroleum on our burning roof-tree. He would also be unable to explain to his friends why he sold them. He would appear like any other of the spendthrifts and idiots who sent to the hammer their libraries and pictures. No pressure would ever have forced him to make such a sale for his own pleasures or his own necessities. To a sensitive and proud man the comment which it would excite was worse to endure than all the blows of adversity. “So you have sold your pictures after all!” a thousand tongues would say to him; and society would say that Ronnie had become like other people at last. They are so silly, so unutterably silly, those flippant sneers of our acquaintances, and yet they irritate and wound like mosquitos.