Lady John was so placed that she could continue to look at our friends, and I made out in her that she was not, in respect to them, without some slight elements of perplexity. These were even sufficient to make her temporarily neglect the defence of the breach I had made in her consistency. "If you mean by 'impressing upon' her speaking to her, he hasn't gone--you can see for yourself--to impress upon her anything; they have the most extraordinary way, which I've already observed, of sitting together without sound. I don't know," she laughed, "what's the matter with such people!" "It proves in general," I admitted, "either some coldness or some warmth, and I quite understand that that's not the way _you_ sit with your friends. You steer admirably clear of every extravagance. I don't see, at any rate, why Mrs. Server is a terror----" But she had already taken me up. "If she doesn't chatter as _I_ do?" She thought it over. "But she does--to everyone but Mr. Briss. I mean to every man she can pick up." I emulated her reflection. "Do they complain of it to you?" "They're more civil than you," she returned; "for if, when they flee before it, they bump up against me in their flight, they don't explain that by intimating that they're come from bad to worse. Besides, I see what they suffer." "And do you hear it?" "What they suffer? No, I've taken care not to suffer myself. I don't listen. It's none of my business." "Is that a way of gently expressing," I ventured to ask, "that it's also none of mine?" "It might be," she replied, "if I had, as you appear to, the imagination of atrocity. But I don't pretend to so much as conceive what's your business." "I wonder if it isn't just now," I said after a moment, "to convict you of an attempt at duplicity that has not even had the saving grace of success! Was it for Brissenden himself that you spoke just now as if you believed him to wish to cling to you?" "Well, I'm kind enough for anything," she goodnaturedly enough laughed. "But what," she asked more sharply, "are you trying to find out?"