‘I daresay; but you know what I mean. You would never be like young Baron Zeppenheim, for instance, whom we knew at Wiesbaden. I really believe he had hundreds of suits of clothes.’ Jerome laughed. ‘I think, sister mine, that such things have about the same significance for us both. You look charming in your bronze velvet, with the old Venetian clasps; but had you nothing to wear but some old black serge, you would still be what you are.’ ‘I suppose so. I cannot imagine what difference it makes. But next I want to ask, have you ever been to our home—our real home that belongs to us—and has the same name as ourselves?’ ‘Have I ever been at Wellfield? Of course I have—ages ago, though, when I was a boy of ten or eleven—nearly sixteen years ago, Avice; and yet I remember it as well as if it had been yesterday.’ ‘Is it nice?’ ‘It is a fine old place—yes—in a fine country. I should like well to see it again.’ ‘I want to go there dreadfully, Jerome. Couldn’t you persuade papa to let us go and stay there for a while when he gets better? He never will talk to me about it. He says it is a musty old place, and that I may think I should like it, but that I should be like himself if I got there—dead in a week, _aus lauter Langeweile_. But I know better. I should be able to do as I liked, and to go out without a maid, and without gloves; and could have a room of my own to put my things in, without the horrid consciousness that in a week or two I should have to rout them all out again. That’s what I feel here; I feel an outcast.’ ‘You have never seen the home of your ancestors, and you are sixteen! I never in the least realised it. Certainly you shall go. I will work him up to it.’ ‘Oh, Jerome, you are an angel!’ she exclaimed fervently. They were passing the English sisters again, who had quarrelled about them; and on hearing this exclamation, and seeing the enraptured face held up to Jerome, ‘Dora’ gave an exultant glance towards ‘Lucy,’ who merely shrugged her shoulders. ‘Were you so anxious to see the old place?’ pursued Jerome. ‘Well, I don’t wonder. It is a place to be proud of.’ ‘Why don’t you go and live there? You could.’ ‘Ah, that is another thing. Wellfield is a lovely spot, and the Abbey is a place to be proud of, no doubt; but to live there, after the kind of life one has been accustomed to here—_c’est autre chose_! It’s a Roman Catholic neighbourhood. Brentwood is close to, you know—the great Jesuit seminary, and a lot of those fossilised Roman Catholic gentry, as proud as Lucifer, and as exclusive as—as only such people can be.’ ‘But surely we are their equals.’ ‘Oh dear, yes! We have always been on the best of terms with them all, chiefly perhaps because we have been so little at Wellfield that there has been no time or chance for differences to arise. I don’t know how I should like it to live in, unless——’ ‘Unless what?’