"Oh, no," breathed the fencing girl to herself, "you are not beautiful, really; you are a personality--that’s it." Elsie sat pulling her gloves through her white hands. "Lance says Mrs. Clutterbuck has a legacy," said Jean bluntly. "I suppose it’s true, but we are never sure of Lance, you know." She passed a cup and some buttered toast. "Oh, yes, it’s true," said Elsie. "I do so envy mamma." "Why? Doesn’t she--haven’t you the benefit of it too?" asked Mabel in surprise. "Oh, yes. It isn’t that, you know." Elsie swept forward, with a little furry cape falling up to her ears as she recovered a dropped glove. "It’s giving papa a holiday. I’ve thought all my life how I should love to grow up and become an heiress, and give my papa a holiday." "You thought that," asked Jean accusingly. "Come now--when you were climbing lamp-posts and skimming down rain-pipes----" "Yes, and breaking into other people’s houses," said Elsie slowly. "Did you do that too?" asked Jean. "Once," said Elsie dreamily, "only once. I was a dreadful trial to my parents," she explained to the fencing girl. "You weren’t spanked enough," said Mabel, shaking her head at her. "My papa was too busy, and mamma too concerned about him to attend to me," smiled Elsie. "Poor mamma! She knew if I told my father what I did, it would disturb his thoughts, and if his thoughts were disturbed he couldn’t work, and if he couldn’t work the rent wouldn’t be paid." "Oh," said Mabel with memories heaping on her, "had you really to worry about the rent?" The fencing girl began to talk at last. "It makes me tired," said she vigorously, "the way in which you people, brought up in provincial and suburban places, talk. Because you can’t afford to be there unless your fathers have enough money to take you there, you think there’s no struggle in the world. You ought to live a bit in towns where people are obliged to show the working side as well as the retired and affluent side. You poor thing, stuck in suburbia, among those Philistines, and thinking about the rent! I suppose they only thought you were bad tempered." The fencing girl had landed them into a conversation more intimate than any they had attempted together. "Oh," said Elsie, and she looked shyly at Mabel and Jean. "I was a tiny little thing when I got my first lesson. A lady and her daughter called on mamma the second week we were in Ridgetown. I came on them in the garden afterwards. They were going out at the gate, and they didn’t see me coming in. This lady said to her daughter, quite amiably: ’It’s no use, my dear; I suppose you observed they have only one maid.’ They never called again." The fencing girl bit her lip with an interrupted laugh. "Isn’t that suburbia?" she asked. "Now, isn’t it?" "It made me a little wild cat," said Elsie. "Everybody in Ridgetown had at least two maids, except ourselves."