"Excuse me, Mr. Vavasor, but how do you know I am not a professional singer?" she said with some haughtiness. "Had you been," answered Vavasor with concealed caution, "I should have learned the fact from your brother." "Have you learned from him that I could sing at all?" "To confess the strange truth, he never told me you were musical." "Very well?" "I beg your pardon." "I mean, how then do you know I am not a professional singer?" "All London would have known it." This second reply, better conceived, soothed Hester's vanity--of which she had more than was good for her, seeing the least speck of it in the noblest is a fly in the cream. "What would you say," she rejoined, "if Corney were to tell to you that the reason of his silence was that, while I was in training, we judged it more prudent, with possible failure ahead, to be silent?" "I should say you cherished a grand ambition, and one in which you could not fail of success," replied Vavasor, who began to think she was leading him gently to the truth. But Hester was in a wayward mood, and inclined to _prospect_. "Suppose such was not really Corney's reason," she resumed, "but that he thought it degraded him to be the brother of an intended professional--what would you say to that?" "I should tell him he was a fool. He cannot know his Burke," he added laughingly, "to be ignorant of the not inconsiderable proportion of professional blood mixed with the blue in our country." It was not in Vavasor's usual taste: he had forgotten his best manners. But in truth he never had any best manners: comparatively few have anything but second-best, as the court of the universe will one day reveal. Hester did not like the remark, and he fancied from her look she had misunderstood him. "Many a singer and actress too has married a duke or a marquis," he supplemented in explanation. "What sort of a duke or marquis?" asked Hester, in a studiedly wooden way. "It was the more shame to them," she added. "Pardon me. I cannot allow that it would be any shame to the best of our nobility--" "I beg your pardon--I meant to the professionals," interrupted Hester. Vavasor was posed. To her other eccentricities it seemed Miss Raymount added radicalism--and that not of the palest pink! But happily for him, Cornelius, who had been all the time making noises on the piano, at this point appeared at the window. "Come, Hetty," he said, "sing that again. I shall sing it ever so much better after! Come, I will play the accompaniment." "It's not worth singing. It would choke me--poor, vapid, vulgar thing!" "Hullo, sis!" cried Cornelius; "it's hardly civil to use such words about any song a fellow cares to sing!"