“Oh! that shows you’ve never read Miss Edgeworth’s tales—now, have you? If you had, you’d have recollected that there was such a word, even if you didn’t remember what it was. If you’ve never read those stories, they would be just the thing to beguile your solitude—vastly improving and moral, and yet quite sufficiently interesting. I’ll lend them to you while you’re all alone.”

“I’m not alone. I’m not at home, but on a visit to the Miss Brownings.”

“Then I’ll bring them to you. I know the Miss Brownings; they used to come regularly on the school-day to the Towers. Pecksy and Flapsy I used to call them. I like the Miss Brownings; one gets enough of respect from them at any rate; and I’ve always wanted to see the kind of ménage of such people. I’ll bring you a whole pile of Miss Edgeworth’s stories, my dear.”

Molly sate quite silent for a minute or two; then she mustered up courage to speak out what was in her mind.

“Your ladyship” (the title was the first-fruits of the lesson, as Molly took it, on paying due respect)—“your ladyship keeps speaking of the sort of—the class of—people to which I belong, as if it was a kind of strange animal you were talking about; yet you talk so openly to me that”——

“Well, go on—I like to hear you.”

Still silence.

“You think me in your heart a little impertinent—now, don’t you?” said Lady Harriet almost kindly.

Molly held her peace for two or three moments; then she lifted her beautiful, honest eyes to Lady Harriet’s face, and said—

“Yes!—a little. But I think you a great many other things.”

“We’ll leave the ‘other things’ for the present. Don’t you see, little one, I talk after my kind, just as you talk after your kind. It’s only on the surface with both of us. Why, I daresay some of your good Hollingford ladies talk of the poor people in a manner which they would consider just as impertinent in their turn, if they could hear it. But I ought to be more considerate when I remember how often my blood has boiled at the modes of speech and behaviour of one of my aunts, mamma’s sister, Lady—— No! I won’t name names. Any one who earns his livelihood by any exercise of head or hands, from professional people and rich merchants down to labourers, she calls ‘persons.’ She would never in her most slip-slop talk accord them even the conventional title of ‘gentlemen’; and the way in which she takes possession of human beings, ‘my woman,’ ‘my people’—but, after all, it is only a way of speaking. I ought not to have used it to you; but somehow I separate you from all these Hollingford people.”

“But why?” persevered Molly. “I’m one of them.”

“Yes, you are. But—now don’t reprove me again for impertinence—most of them are so unnatural in their exaggerated respect and admiration when they come up to the Towers, and put on so much pretence by way of fine manners, that they only make themselves objects of ridicule. You at least are simple and truthful, and that’s why I separate you in my own mind from them, and have talked unconsciously to you as I would——well! now here’s another piece of impertinence—as I would to my equal—in rank, I mean; for I don’t set myself up in solid things as any better than my neighbours. Here’s tea, however, come in time to stop me from growing too humble.”

It was a very pleasant little tea in the fading September twilight.

Just as it was ended, in came Mr. Preston again—