Lady Speed was undoubtedly a fine woman. "Fine" was exactly the right word for her, for she was just a little too elderly to be called beautiful and perhaps too tall ever to have been called pretty. Though she was upright and clear-skinned and finely-featured, and although the two decades of her married life had seemed to leave very little conspicuous impression on her, yet there was a sense, perhaps, in which she looked her age; it might have been guessed rightly as between forty and fifty. She had blue eyes of that distinctively English hue that might almost be the result of gazing continually upon miles and miles of rolling English landscape; and her nose, still attractively _retroussé_, though without a great deal of the pertness it must have had in her youth, held just enough of patricianly bearing to enable her to manage competently the twenty odd domestics whose labours combined to make Beachings Over habitable. She kissed Helen warmly. "My dear, I'm so pleased to meet you. But you'll have to rough it along with us, you know--I'm afraid we don't live at all in style. We're just ordinary country folks, that's all.... And when you've had your lunch and got refreshed I must take you over the house and show you everything...." Speed laughed and said: "Mother always tells visitors that they've got to rough it. But there's nothing to rough. I wonder what she'd say if she had to live three months at Lavery's." "Lavery's?" said Lady Speed, uncomprehendingly. "Lavery's is the name of my House at Millstead. I was made housemaster of it at the beginning of the term." He spoke a little proudly. "Oh, yes, I seem to know the name. I believe your father was mentioning something about it to me once, but I hardly remember--" "But how on earth did he know anything about it? I never wrote telling him." "Well, I expect he heard it from somebody.... I really couldn't tell you exactly.... I've had a most awful morning before you came--had to dismiss one of the maids--she'd stolen a thermos-flask. So ungrateful of her, because I'd have given it to her if she'd only asked me for it. One of my best maids, she was."