‘And what has she gone to London for?’

‘Oh, I don’t know—she has so many things to do.’

‘And where is Mr. Berrington?’

‘He has been away somewhere; but I believe he is coming back to-morrow—or next day.’

‘Or the day after?’ said Lady Davenant. ‘And do they never go away together?’ she continued after a pause.

‘Yes, sometimes—but they don’t come back together.’

‘Do you mean they quarrel on the way?’

‘I don’t know what they do, Lady Davenant—I don’t understand,’ Laura Wing replied, with an unguarded tremor in her voice. ‘I don’t think they are very happy.’

‘Then they ought to be ashamed of themselves. They have got everything so comfortable—what more do they want?’

‘Yes, and the children are such dears!’

‘Certainly—charming. And is she a good person, the present governess? Does she look after them properly?’

‘Yes—she seems very good—it’s a blessing. But I think she’s unhappy too.’

‘Bless us, what a house! Does she want some one to make love to her?’

‘No, but she wants Selina to see—to appreciate,’ said the young girl.

‘And doesn’t she appreciate—when she leaves them that way quite to the young woman?’

‘Miss Steet thinks she doesn’t notice how they come on— she is never there.’

‘And has she wept and told you so? You know they are always crying, governesses—whatever line you take. You shouldn’t draw them out too much—they are always looking for a chance. She ought to be thankful to be let alone. You mustn’t be too sympathetic—it’s mostly wasted,’ the old lady went on.

‘Oh, I’m not—I assure you I’m not,’ said Laura Wing. ‘On the contrary, I see so much about me that I don’t sympathise with.’

‘Well, you mustn’t be an impertinent little American either!’ her interlocutress exclaimed. Laura sat with her for half an hour and the conversation took a turn through the affairs of Plash and through Lady Davenant’s own, which were visits in prospect and ideas suggested more or less directly by them as well as by the books she had been reading, a heterogeneous pile on a table near her, all of them new and clean, from a circulating library in London. The old woman had ideas and Laura liked them, though they often struck her as very sharp and hard, because at Mellows she had no diet of that sort. There had never been an idea in the house, since she came at least, and there was wonderfully little reading. Lady Davenant still went from country-house to country-house all winter, as she had done all her life, and when Laura asked her she told her the places and the people she probably should find at each of them. Such an enumeration was much less interesting to the girl than it would have been a year before: she herself had now seen a great many places and people and the freshness of her curiosity was gone. But she still cared for Lady Davenant’s descriptions and judgments, because they were the thing in her life which (when she met the old woman from time to time) most represented talk—the rare sort of talk that was not mere chaff. That was what she had dreamed of before she came to England, but in Selina’s set the dream had not come true. In Selina’s set people only harried each other from morning till night with extravagant accusations—it was all a kind of horse-play of false charges. When Lady Davenant was accusatory it was within the limits of perfect verisimilitude.