Nobody cared to meet anybody face to face, and they were doing it sixty times an hour. Florrie Maxwell had no means of avoiding; Aunt Lavvy unless either of them stopped in their bedrooms; and the servants, mercilessly curious, were all over the bedrooms, clattering slop-pails, purposely slow at their jobs, until one o’clock. Besides, Aunt Lavvy had recently discovered that a gentlewoman’s gracious passage through a day should lead her inevitably from a fragrant toilet and a dainty meal, to a pretty boudoir or parlour, and not back again to the disturbed scene of the toilet. In other words, she sat in the drawing-room. So did Mrs. Maxwell, with intervals in the dining-room, when she could bear no longer the torture of Aunt Lavvy placidly behaving as though nothing had happened. But Stanley and Grace were in the dining-room; Stanley good-humouredly detached from the Upset (the comprehensive name they had begun to use, for want of a better, in allusion to all that was happening), and Grace offended, because what “father” had said naturally involved “mother.” Sometimes she slipped away to talk things over with Miss Roberts. “If only they would all be as sensible as you” was soothing to hear; besides, whenever by quiet policy they re-settled a by-issue, they had a pleasant illusion that, as representatives, they had thereby settled the main issue once and for all. Miss Roberts was sitting up in her attic room that Sunday morning; but Ursula and Lottie were hanging about in the schoolroom, barely tolerated by Nurse, who, recognizing them as Hal-ites and nurslings of the second generation and not the despised third, yet could not forget that their presence officially stamped the nursery as a schoolroom. At one moment, Lottie felt that inaction was unbearable, and stole up into Aunt Lavvy’s empty room to see if anything within her scope could be done to sweeten matters and lighten them. She found to her content that the plump little pincushion on the dressing-table was almost void of pins; and, returning to the nursery, waited for Nurse’s temporary absence, to tear off several rows from the long bristling paper in the work-basket. Gleefully, she confided her purpose in Ursula, and then trotted back to prick the pins into the cushion to form a huge and elaborate L.