He takes a step closer to Tita, as if to protect her.  It seems hideous to him that she should have to discuss—­that she should even have known him.

“Well, neither am I,” says Mrs. Chichester.  “He is horrid, and as ugly as the——­” She had the grace to stop here, and change her sentence.  “As ugly can be.”

It is a lame conclusion, but she is consoled for it by the fact that some of her audience understand what the natural end of that sentence would have been.

“And what manners!” says she.  “After all,” with a pretty little shake of her head, “what can you expect of a man with hair as red as a carrot?”

“Decency, at all events,” says Tom Hescott coldly.

“Oh!  That—­last of all,” says Mrs. Chichester.

“Lady Warbeck is a very charming old lady,” says Margaret Knollys, breaking into the conversation with a view to changing it.

“Yes,” says Mrs. Chichester.  She laughs mischievously.  “And such a delightful contrast to her son!  She is so good.”

“She’s funny, isn’t she?” says Tita, throwing back her lovely little head, and laughing as if at some late remembrance.

“No; good—­good!" insists Mrs. Chichester.  “Captain Marryatt, were you with me when she called that day in town?  No?  Oh! well," with a little glance meant for him alone—­a glance that restores him at once to good humour, and his position as her slave once more—­“you ought to have been.”

“What did she say, then?” asks Minnie Hescott.

“Nothing to signify, really.  But as a contrast to her son, she is perhaps, as Lady Rylton has just said, ‘funny.’  It was about a book—­a book we are all reading nowadays; and she said she couldn’t recommend it to me, as it bordered on impropriety!  I was so enchanted.”

“I know the book you mean,” says Mrs. Bethune, who has just sauntered up to them in her slow, graceful fashion.

“Well, of course,” says Mrs. Chichester.  “Such nonsense condemning it!  As if anybody worried about impropriety nowadays.  Why, it has gone out of fashion.  It is an exploded essence.  Nobody gives it a thought.”

“That is fatally true," says old Miss Gower in a sepulchral tone.  She has been sitting in a corner near them, knitting sedulously until now.  But now she uplifts her voice.  She uplifts her eyes, too, and fixes them on Mrs. Chichester the frivolous.  “Do your own words never make you shiver?” asks she austerely.

“Never,” gaily; “I often wish they would in warm weather.”

Miss Gower uprears herself.

“Be careful, woman! be careful!” says she gloomily.  “There is a warmer climate in store for some of us than has been ever known on earth!”

She turns aside abruptly, and strides from the room.

Randal Gower gives way to mirth, and so do most of the others.  Mrs. Chichester, it is true, laughs a little, but Tita can see that the laughter is somewhat forced.