The question came as hard as a stroke after the cushioned assurance preceding it. Jeff met it as he might have met such a query from a man to whom he owed no veilings of hard facts. "I don't know," said he. "If I did know I shouldn't tell you." Madame Beattie seemed not to suspect the possibility of rebuff. "Esther hasn't changed a particle," said she. Jeff scowled, not at her, but absently at the side of the house, and made no answer. "Aren't you coming down there?" asked Madame Beattie peremptorily, with the air of drumming him up to some task that would have to be reckoned with in the end. "Come, Jeff, why don't you answer? Aren't you coming down?" Jeffrey had ceased scowling. He had smoothed his brows out with his hand, indeed, as if their tenseness hurt him. "Look here," said he, "you ask a lot of questions." She laughed again, a different sort of old laugh, a fat and throaty one. "Did I ever tell you," said she, "what the Russian grand duke said when I asked him why he didn't marry?" "No," said Jeff, quite peaceably now. She was safer in the company of remembered royalties. Madame Beattie sought among the jingling decorations of her person for a cigarette, found it and offered him another. "Quite good," she told him. "An Italian count keeps me supplied. I don't know where the creature gets them." Then, after they had lighted up, she returned to her grand duke, and Jeff found the story sufficiently funny and laughed at it, and she pulled another out of her well-stored memory, and he laughed at that. Madame Beattie told her stories excellently. She knew how little weight they carry smothered in feminine graces and coy obliquities from the point. Graces had long ceased to interest her as among the assets of a life where man and woman have to work to feed themselves. Now she sat down with her brother man and emulated him in ready give and take. Jeffrey forsook the rail which had subtly marked his distance from her; he took a chair, and put his feet up on the rail. Madame Beattie's neatly shod and very small feet went up on a chair, and she tipped the one she was sitting in at a dangerous angle while she exhaled luxuriously, and so Lydia, coming round the corner in a simple curiosity to know who was there, found them, laughing uproariously and dim with smoke. Lydia had her opinions about smoking. She had seen women indulge in it at some of the functions where she and Anne danced, but she had never found a woman of this stamp doing it with precisely this air. Indeed, Lydia had never seen a woman of Madame Beattie's stamp in her whole life. She stopped short, and the two could not at once get hold of themselves in their peal of accordant mirth. But Lydia had time to see one thing for a certainty. Jeff's face had cleared of its brooding and its intermittent scowl. He was enjoying himself. This, she thought, in a sudden rage of scorn, was the kind of thing he enjoyed: not Farvie, not