She overcame her own finer scruples and invaded the Burnet household. Apart from fresh aspects of Susan’s character in the capacity of a hostess she gained little light from that. She had never felt so completely outside a home in her life as she did when she was in the Burnets’ parlour. The very tablecloth on which the tea was spread had an air of being new and protective of familiar things; the tea was manifestly quite unlike their customary tea, it was no more intimate than the confectioner’s shop window from which it mostly came; the whole room was full of the muffled cries of things hastily covered up and specially put away. Vivid oblongs on the faded wallpaper betrayed even a rearrangement of the pictures. Susan’s mother was a little dingy woman, wearing a very smart new cap to the best of her ability; she had an air of having been severely shaken up and admonished, and her general bearing confessed only too plainly how shattered those preparations had left her. She watched her capable daughter for cues. Susan’s sisters displayed a disposition to keep their backs against something and at the earliest opportunity to get into the passage and leave Susan and her tremendous visitor alone but within earshot. They started convulsively when they were addressed and insisted on “your ladyship.” Susan had told them not to but they would. When they supposed themselves to be unobserved they gave themselves up to the impassioned inspection of Lady Harman’s costume. Luke had fled into the street, and in spite of various messages conveyed to him by the youngest sister he refused to enter until Lady Harman had gone again and was well out of the way. And Susan was no longer garrulous and at her ease; she had no pins in her mouth and that perhaps hampered her speech; she presided flushed and bright-eyed in a state of infectious nervous tension. Her politeness was awful. Never in all her life had Lady Harman felt her own lack of real conversational power so acutely. She couldn’t think of a thing that mightn’t be construed as an impertinence and that didn’t remind her of district visiting. Yet perhaps she succeeded better than she supposed. “What a family you have had!” she said to Mrs. Burnet. “I have four little girls, and I find them as much as we can manage.” “You’re young yet, my ladyship,” said Mrs. Burnet, “and they aren’t always the blessings they seem to be. It’s the rearing’s the difficulty.” “They’re all such healthy-looking—people.” “I wish we could get hold of Luke, my ladyship, and show you _’im_. He’s that sturdy. And yet when ’e was a little feller——” She was launched for a time on those details that were always so dear to the mothers of the past order of things. Her little spate of reminiscences was the only interlude of naturalness in an afternoon of painfully constrained behaviour.... Lady Harman returned a trifle shamefacedly from this abortive dip into realities to Mr. Brumley’s speculative assurance. §9