The new-made Darnleys, James and his sister, were triumphantly ushered into the upper world by Lady Adela, whose father’s rise, whose mother’s persistence, had won at last a reluctant toleration from her betters. Accustomed from her birth to live on terms of acquaintance with more or less interesting or conspicuous people, Lady Adela had developed something of that native air and ease which James Dadd had never been able to acquire in all his long exile from his own social hemisphere. Nor did James Dadd, transformed into James Darnley, ever succeed in fitting himself perfectly to his altered conditions. His wife, besides loving him devotedly, if placidly, did all she could to acclimatize him; she made him buy a vast new house on the Yorkshire moors; she filled it with people, she made her husband play the squire; but to the last this man of many descents remained less adaptable, less congenial to his new environment than many a versatile Hebrew whom twenty years of unlimited wealth transform into what is nowadays considered a very tolerable imitation of an English gentleman--especially as seen on the stage. Among people who talked of money and diseases with a freedom that struck him as indecent, James Darnley, brought up to think both topics unmentionable, remained timid and uncomfortable to the end of his days, and when at last a combination of dyspepsia and a Primrose League banquet caused him to retire from a world in which he had always been a stranger, even Lady Adela felt that he was somehow set free from a long bondage. Gentle in her grief as in all her other emotions, she resigned herself to becoming crapes, and found new pleasure in the guardianship of her son Kingston, now turned eleven. But if James Darnley, first of his line, died a failure, far otherwise was it with his sister. In her the blood of great-great-great-grandmother Messiter must have seethed and boiled with concentrated virulence, for she took to her new life with a zeal that left nothing to be desired, and soon dropped behind her all trace and all memory of Darnley-on-Downe. Her manners, from the first, were forward and easy; her ambition was to be considered a woman of fashion, and she carried to its accomplishment a temperament entirely devoid of bashfulness or indecision. Mr. Mimburn, her wealthy stockbroker husband, soon shrank into mere cheque-signing obscurity beside the flaming figure of his wife. Her remarks were quoted, her gowns described; she became at last, in those far-off days, a precursor of that modern type of woman who is perfectly virtuous, except in dress, manners, and mind. Nothing would have horrified her more than illicit proposals, except the accusation of being shocked by them; nothing have more appalled her than an attack on her virtue, except the suspicion that she had any.