"Quite so." The young man was listened to, and he continued to argue
for a long while that it was not reasonable for a woman to expect a
man to spend the whole morning reading the _Times_, and that
apparently was what Beatrice wished poor Canary to do until she
chose to come down. Nevertheless, the general opinion was in favour
of Beatrice and against the girl.

"Beatrice has been so kind to her," and everybody had something to
say on this point.

"But what happened?" Evelyn asked, and the leader of this
conversation, a merry little face with eyes like wild flowers and a
great deal of shining hair, told of Beatrice's desperate condition
when the news of Miss ----'s betrayal reached her.

"I went up and found her in tears, her hair hanging down her back,
saying that nobody cared for her. Although she spends three thousand
a year on clothes, she sits up in that bedroom in a dressing-gown
that we have known for the last five years. "Well, Beatrice," I
said, "if you'll only put on a pair of stays and dress yourself and
come downstairs, perhaps somebody will care for you."

A writer upon economic subjects who trailed a black lock of hair over
a bald skull declared he could see the scene in Beatrice's bedroom
quite clearly, and he spoke of her woolly poodle looking on, trying
to understand what it was all about, and his allusion to the poodle
made everybody laugh, for some reason not very apparent, and Evelyn
wondered at the difference between the people she was now among and
those she had left--the nuns in their convent at the edge of