anticipated them--or is it it?--by telling them to go to the devil, they
would have disowned me long ago. Now they're afraid of me, and I've got the
whip hand. A kind of blackmail; so they let me alone."

"But if you made a _mesalliance_, as they call it," said I, "they'd be
down upon you like a cartload of bricks."

"Bricks?" she retorted, with a laugh. "A cartload of puff-balls. There
isn't a real brick in the whole obsolete structure. I could marry a beggar
man to-morrow and provided he was a decent sort and didn't get drunk and
knock me about and pick his teeth with his fork, I should have them all
around me and the beggar man in a week's time, trying to save face. They'd
move heaven and earth to make the beggar man acceptable. They know that if
they didn't, I'd be capable of going about with him like a raggle-taggle
gipsy--and bring awful disgrace on them."

"All that may be true," said I, "but the modest Lackaday doesn't realize
it."

"I'll put sense into him," replied Lady Auriol. And that was the end,
conclusive or not, of the conversation.

In the afternoon they went off for a broiling walk together. What they
found to say to each other, I don't know. Lady Auriol let me no further
into her confidence, and my then degree of intimacy with the General did
not warrant the betrayal of my pardonable curiosity as to the amount of
sense put into him by the independent lady.

Now, from what I have related, it may seem that Lady Auriol had brought up
all her storm troops for a frontal attack on the position in which the shy