“Oh, look here, you people,” she broke in, “we can’t sit here all day to listen to Hughie being made more conceited than he is. Come out and skate.” She snatched Major Bunbury’s plate from before him, and put it down in front of an expectant cat, flung a dinner napkin over her husband’s head, and fell to arranging her fringe and veil at a looking-glass with minute care and entire disregard of the company. As Miss Morris walked after her cousin’s wife down the snowy path to the lake, she framed with a confident touch the description that she would give of her to Mr. Glasgow. Scarcely less confidently, and with a comfortable sense of fore-knowledge of his ideas and point of view, she formulated the phrase in which he would give his opinion of Lady Susan. It was satisfactory to reflect that, though she was a failure in Lady Susan’s set, she found no difficulty in talking to intellectual people like Mr. Wilfred Glasgow. A light and stinging wind blew along the ice, powdering the surface with infinitely delicate particles of snow. The graceful lawns and slopes of Hurlingham stared in blank whiteness, the evergreens stood out unnaturally dark and trim in the colourless monotony; beyond the scrape and hiss of the skates the silence was extraordinary. Slaney did not enjoy herself. The south-west of Ireland is not the climate in which to learn skating; she toiled up against the wind with aching ankles, she drifted back in front of it, and finally, in bitter resentment of her ungainly helplessness, achieved the haven of a chair. Lady Susan swung and circled, and knew that her colour was rising in a manner more becoming than the best rouge that money could buy; Major Bunbury swung assiduously after her. Hugh was cutting intricate figures far away. Slaney began thinking of the gaunt afternoon service in progress at that moment in the church of Letter Kyle. There would be no music because she was not there to play the harmonium; Uncle Charles would be longer and louder than ever over the responses to the Psalms now that her reproving eye was off him; Mr. Glasgow----no, she felt tolerably sure that the Sundays of her absence would not be the ones selected by Mr. Glasgow for walking over to afternoon service at Letter Kyle. “Come along, Slaney,” said Captain French, sailing down upon her with his hands extended, “I know it’s poor fun for you, but you must keep at it.” They moved off together, and Slaney felt, as she often did, a glow of appreciation of Hugh’s desire to make things pleasant for others. She did not notice character very much, except at the moments when it was in contact with herself. Between the manifestations of her cousin’s amiability towards her she habitually thought of him as merely unintellectual. At this stage of Slaney’s history intellectual people were to her as irrevocably severed from the others as were the sheep from the goats.