Mrs. Fane did not answer directly. She looked round the cosy morning-room, with rather a wistful expression. It was a very charming room, decorated in the fashion of a quaint, old parlour. In such an apartment might Jane Austen's heroines have sat, and the two ladies in modern dresses looked rather out of place. Mrs. Fane was tall and statuesque, with a placid, firm face, beautiful but cold. Her eyes were calm; she had none of those wrinkles which show the indulgence of emotion, and an earthquake would have failed to upset her eternal self-possession. Occupied in knitting a fleecy shawl, she scarcely lifted her eyes as she spoke, but continued to work placidly, never dropping a single stitch. There never was a woman who had herself so much under control as Mrs. Fane. Laura often wondered how she came to marry an excitable, vivacious man like Walter. But perhaps the exception to the law that like draws to like drew them together, and Mrs. Fane found in her husband, whose nature was so totally opposed to her own, the complement of herself. The sisters resembled one another very little: Mrs. Fane was dark and tall, Laura slight and fair. Laura laughed when she was amused, showed anger when she felt it, and indulged unrestrained in her emotions, though she never exceeded them. She was as open in her disposition as Mrs. Fane was secretive. A glance would reveal Laura's thoughts, but no scrutiny would show what Mrs. Fane had in her mind. Both of them were plainly dressed, but Laura indulged in a few more trimmings than her sister. Mrs. Fane might have been a lady abbess, from the severity of her black garb. And a very good abbess she would have made, only the nuns under her charge would have been controlled with a rod of iron. She had no weaknesses herself, and had no patience with them in others. Not even pain appealed to her, for she had never been ill. Toothache was unknown to her; headaches she had never experienced; and she seemed to move amongst less favoured mortals like a goddess, majestic, unfeeling, and far removed from the engaging weaknesses of human nature. Mrs. Fane, by reason of this abnormal severity, was not popular. To make a happy marriage, either the man or the woman must rule. If both have strong wills, separation or divorce is the only remedy to avert an unhappy life. If the man is strong, he controls the woman; if the woman has the will, she guides the man; and thus with no divided kingdom, the domestic life can be fairly happy, in some cases completely so.