I thanked her again, but remained firm in my intention of accustoming myself to company. Stay in my room, indeed, with Lord Robert at dinner--never! However, when I did come down, he was surrounded by Montgomeries, and pranced into the dining-room with Lady Verningham. She must have arranged that. I had such a bore! A young Mackintosh cousin of Mary’s husband, and on the other side the parson. The one talked about botany in a hoarse whisper, with a Scotch accent, and the other gobbled his food, and made kind of pious jokes in between the mouthfuls! I said--when I had borne it bravely up to the ices--I hated knowing what flowers were composed of, I only liked to pick them. The youth stared, and did not speak much more. For the parson, “yes” now and then did, and like that we got through dinner. Malcolm was opposite me, and he gaped most of the time. Even he might have been better than the botanist, but I suppose Lady Katherine felt these two would be a kind of half mourning for me. No one could have felt gay with them. After dinner Lady Verningham took me over to a sofa with her, in a corner. The sofas here don’t have pillows, as at Branches, but fortunately this one is a little apart, though not comfortable, and we could talk. “You poor child,” she said, “you had a dull time. I was watching you! What did that M^cTavish creature find to say to you?” I told her, and that his name was Mackintosh, not M^cTavish. “Yes, I know,” she said, “but I call the whole clan M^cTavish--it is near enough, and it does worry Mary so; she corrects me every time. Now don’t you want to get married, and be just like Mary?” There was a twinkle in her eye. I said I had not felt wild about it yet. I wanted to go and see life first. But she told me one couldn’t see life unless one was married. “Not even if one is an adventuress, like me?” I asked. “A _what!!_” “An adventuress,” I said. “People do seem so astonished when I say that! I have got to be one, you know, because Mrs. Carruthers never left me the money after all, and in the book I read about it, it said you were that if you had nice clothes, and--and--red hair--and things and no home.” She rippled all over with laughter. “You duck!” she said. “Now you and I will be friends. Only you must not play with Robert Vavasour. He belongs to me! He is one of my special and particular own pets. Is it a bargain?”