The whimsical smile that twitched at one corner of Rome’s thin mouth was unreturned by mamma, whose face was gravely bent over her work. Mamma was a good wife and never joked with her children about papa’s vagaries. No one had ever got behind mamma’s guard in the matter of papa--if it was a guard. Who could see into mamma’s mind, idly speculated Rome. Mamma had, by forty-five years of age, achieved a kind of delicate impenetrability. Papa, at fifty, was as limpid as the clear water of a running stream, where you may watch the fishes swimming to and fro, round and round. Papa came back, alone and looking hurt. At the same moment Vicky came in at the long window, pink-cheeked, smelling of frost. “Where’s Mr. Carter, papa?” “Gone away, Vicky. He--he couldn’t stop.” “I suppose he was shocked to death. Oh, well....” But, of them all, only mamma knew _how_ shocked the orthodox people of the seventies were about matters of unbelief. The children had been brought up in the wrong atmosphere really to know it. Mamma knew that to Mr. Carter papa’s action would seem dreadful, blasphemous, very nearly wicked. “After all,” said Vicky, impatiently, “we’re living in the year 1879. We’re moderns after all.” Dashingly modern Vicky looked in her sinuous art-green dress, with her massed Rossetti hair and jade earrings. Daringly, brilliantly modern, and all agog for life. A dashing girl, as they called them in 1879--if a girl bitten with æstheticism can still dash, and it may be taken for granted that dashing girls will always dash, whatever bites them. Catching up slim young Irving from his chair, Vicky twirled him round the room in a waltz. 5 BLOOMSBURY AND SOUTH PLACE