“Pray, who would, if I didn’t?” Lady Aurora inquired. “It only takes a minute, if one knows how.” Her manner was jocosely apologetic, and she seemed to plead guilty to having been absurd; in the dim light Hyacinth thought he saw her blush, as if she were much embarrassed. In spite of her blushing, her appearance and manner suggested to him a personage in a comedy. She sounded the letter _r_ peculiarly. “I can do it, beautifully. I often do it, when Mrs Major doesn’t come up,” Paul Muniment said, continuing to thump his sister’s couch in an appreciative but somewhat subversive manner. “Oh, I have no doubt whatever!” Lady Aurora exclaimed, quickly. “Mrs Major must have so very much to do.” “Not in the making-up of beds, I’m afraid; there are only two or three, down there, for so many,” Paul Muniment remarked loudly, and with a kind of incongruous cheerfulness. “Yes, I have thought a great deal about that. But there wouldn’t be room for more, you know,” said Lady Aurora, this time in a very serious tone. “There’s not much room for a family of that sort anywhere—thirteen people of all ages and sizes,” the young man rejoined. “The world’s pretty big, but there doesn’t seem room.” “We are also thirteen at home;” said Lady Aurora, laughing again. “We are also rather crowded.” “Surely you don’t mean at Inglefield?” Rosy inquired eagerly, in her dusky nook. “I don’t know about Inglefield. I am so much in town.” Hyacinth could see that Inglefield was a subject she wished to turn off, and to do so she added, “We too are of all ages and sizes.” “Well, it’s fortunate you are not all _your_ size!” Paul Muniment exclaimed, with a freedom at which Hyacinth was rather shocked, and which led him to suspect that, though his new friend was a very fine fellow, a delicate tact was not his main characteristic. Later he explained this by the fact that he was rural and provincial, and had not had, like himself, the benefit of metropolitan culture; and later still he asked himself what, after all, such a character as that had to do with tact or with compliments, and why its work in the world was not most properly performed by the simple exercise of a rude, manly strength.