"That doesn't do us any good," Rodney Temple corrected, "because we
always blame the spoon."

"Don't you mind them, dear," Mrs. Temple cooed. She was a little,
apple-faced woman, with a figure suggestive of a tea-cozy, and a voice
with a gurgle in it, like a dove's. A nervous, convulsive moment of her
pursed-up little mouth made that organ an uncertain element in her
physiognomy, shifting as it did from one side of her face to the other
with the rapidity of an aurora borealis. "Don't mind them, dear. A woman
can never do more than reflect 'broken lights' of her husband, when she
has a good one. Don't you love that expression?--'broken lights'? 'We
are but broken lights of Thee!' Dear Tennyson! And no word yet from
Madame de Melcourt."

"I don't expect any now," Olivia explained. "If Aunt Vic had meant to
write she would have done it long ago. I'm afraid I've offended her past
forgiveness."

She held her head slightly to one side, smiling with an air of mock
penitence.

"Dear, dear!" Mrs. Temple murmured, sympathetically. "Just because you
wouldn't marry a Frenchman!"

"And a little because I'm _going_ to marry an Englishman. To Aunt Vic
all Englishmen are grocers."

"Horrid old thing!" Drusilla said, indignantly.

"It's because she doesn't know them, of course," Olivia went on. "It's