Mrs. Mince was in the act of returning _Hints on Heaven_ to its niche upon a shelf when the eldest Miss Snodley appeared before her, a celestial vision, bearing work-bag and Bible. Miss Zinia Snodley was an excessively thin little lady with prominent teeth, pince-nez, and a high forehead. Her hair was dragged back tyrannically and fastened in a diminutive and irritable bob at the back of her head. She had a habit of tilting her sparrow’s beak of a nose in the air and of chirping volubly with a species of declamatory splutter. She thrust out a thin hand, its fingers primly extended and pressed into line, and beamed excitably in the vicaress’s big and pallid face. “Such news, my dear! I am quite out of breath hurrying here to tell you all about it before the others came. Such news!” Mrs. Mince sat down with some deliberation; she knew the length of Miss Snodley’s despatches. “Quite romantic,” spluttered Miss Zinia. “He proposed to her in the Gabingly rose-garden, you know. I heard all about it—” “About what?” interjected the vicaress. “Young Strong’s engagement, my dear.” Mrs. Mince held up her duster. “Not to that woman!” “There, I knew you would be amazed. They tell me Ophelia fainted; frightful affectation in a great, strapping girl like that; but then, my dear, those big creatures are always so emotional. I told my cousin Herbert years ago that I would never marry, and the poor fellow got engaged to a dissenter two months afterwards out of pique. Men are so inferior in these days. And those Gusset girls are shocking; they remind me of the pictures of that awful man Rossetti. You should have known my grandfather; he was such a gentleman, and could quote Latin like a native.” Mrs. Mince adjusted the patent ventilator in the roof and remarked that the room seemed “stuffy.” “Of course I had foreseen the thing for weeks,” she said, with emphasis, not desirous of appearing too markedly impressed. “I expected the affair every day. Mr. Mince is very intimate with dear Lord Gerald.” Mrs. Marjoy’s spectacles glittered in the doorway. The pair pounced upon her, both speaking at once, as though eager to claim precedence in the sensation. At the conclusion thereof Mrs. Marjoy displayed the deficiencies in her dental array. “A mere matter of decency,” she observed, with superlative sagacity. “The Gusset girl had to avoid a scandal. These society women are impossible. Ask my husband; he’s a man of the world.”