‘I don’t think he will trouble with either of us,’ said Catherine, composedly. ‘We are not in trade, we should be wide of his mark. Will he continue to come here? I mean, will he drop you from his visiting-list, or will you drop him from yours?’ ‘Oh dear no, not so far as I am concerned. I am not particular lest any offence should come between the wind and my gentility, and my friends know my Bohemian tendencies. My acquaintances are aware beforehand of the risks they run in countenancing me. Besides, the Constables, as everybody has heard, are blood relations of mine, and it does not suit my pride to throw them over, though they were to take to highway robbery, instead of grinding corn and baking bread, as they have done all along,’ said Louisa Hilliard, raising her head with a genuinely aristocratic movement, notwithstanding the shortness of her neck. ‘Then,’ she resumed in her usual tone, ‘I should lose the opportunity of seeing Fan stiffening into stone and at the same time kindling into a white heat before the bitter draught she has to swallow. And when all is said, Oliver Constable cannot get rid of the rather important items that he has been bred a university man, and has succeeded to a considerable patrimony, even though he should be eccentric enough to knead dough with his own hands or carry round a basket of loaves like St. Elizabeth on his head.’ Mrs. Hilliard ended hastily with a greater concession to public opinion than her previous sentence had implied. The next moment she began to laugh at the picture she had conjured up. ‘I think I see him,’ she exclaimed, in high glee; ‘as if he did not make a sufficient spectacle of himself already—an Adonis who must contort himself into a Caliban—what a waste of good looks!’ ‘I do not agree with you,’ said Catherine, with her sincerity as striking and more rampant than Fan Constable’s. ‘In the first place, he is not an Adonis, though he is a fairly handsome man. In the second, I should hate good looks which were not liable to be affected by temper and mood. They would be little better than those of a barber’s block. As a contrast, I could easily understand the fascination of the mobile ugliness of a Mirabeau. An Adonis liable to be replaced at any moment by a Caliban, is not at all a bad idea for enhancing the fugitive graces of Adonis. But Oliver Constable is not an Adonis.’