‘Oh, it may suit Louisa Hilliard to profess that she is indifferent to public opinion and independent of it, that she is a privileged, irresponsible person, in short. But you are greatly mistaken if you think you will escape her gibing tongue and impertinent laughter. And you will find to your cost that when the matter is of the least importance she will take care to comply with the world’s standard.’ ‘I don’t wish to stand between any genial soul and her jest,’ said Oliver; ‘and I am sure, Fan, you need not quarrel with respect for social standards.’ ‘I don’t quarrel with it,’ said Fan, decidedly. ‘I think that whatever the social standards of the past may have been, social standards in our day ought in the main to be deferred to by all sensible people. What I object to, naturally, is that you should insist on running counter to them in order to indulge in a wild dream.’ ‘I plead guilty,’ said Oliver. ‘As for Catherine Hilliard,’ Fan went on, ‘she is not too much “in the clouds,” as you call it, to prevent her coming down among ordinary people and saying very stinging sarcastic things. Louisa is only too well content with herself and her belongings; but I think Catherine Hilliard is a discontented girl.’ ‘The level of “a low content,”’ muttered Oliver, gratifying his father’s old, half-blind, half-deaf English terrier ‘Ned’ with a sardine. Fan did not catch the quotation, or notice the typical act: she was leaping to a conclusion. ‘Catherine Hilliard is so dissatisfied with herself and everything around her, that I fancy she will learn to welcome any change of circumstances, until she may get the length of selling herself and her feelings some day. Then, no doubt, after the bargain is completed, she will turn round and decide that this gain also is not worth a tithe of what she has paid for it.’ ‘You have no right to speak so, Fan,’ said Oliver angrily. ‘Of course, I don’t pretend to guess how Catherine Hilliard may dispose of herself,’ he went on more calmly; ‘but she has always appeared to me a kind of nineteenth-century vestal virgin, a “Christian priestess of Nature” and such letters and art as have come in her way. That is not the sort of creature who sells herself.’ ‘I beg your pardon, Oliver.’ Fan contradicted her brother with mingled dignity and obstinacy. ‘And I beg your pardon, Fan.’ Oliver perpetrated with considerable success a mimicry of his sister’s manner. ‘There,’ he said quickly, ‘as you are always tempted to be unfair to the Hilliards, we had better let the subject drop.’ Fan did not protest against the charge of unfairness, or insist on prolonging the discussion. Perhaps her conscience pricked her a little. She was perfectly sensible in the truthfulness of her nature that Louisa Hilliard was her _bête noire_. Fan used to say to herself without disguise, ‘I can’t bear Louisa Hilliard.’