Mrs. Kame had proposed herself—­again the word “delicately” must be used —­for one of Honora’s first house-parties.  Only an acute perception could have read in the lady’s praise of Hugh a masterly avoidance of that part of his career already registered on the social slate.  Mrs. Kame had thought about them and their wonderful happiness in these autumn days at Grenoble; to intrude on that happiness yet awhile would be a sacrilege.  Later, perhaps, they would relent and see something of their friends, and throw open again the gates of a beautiful place long closed to the world.  And—­without the air of having picked the single instance, but of having chosen from many—­Mrs. Kame added that she had only lately seen Elsie Shorter, whose admiration for Honora was greater than ever.  A sentiment, Honora reflected a little bitterly, that Mrs. Shorter herself had not taken the pains to convey.  Consistency was not Elsie’s jewel.

It must perhaps be added for the sake of enlightenment that since going to Newport Honora’s view of the writer of this letter had changed.  In other words, enlarging ideals had dwarfed her somewhat; it was strictly true that the lady was a boon companion of everybody.  Her Catholicism had two limitations only:  that she must be amused, and that she must not—­in what she deemed the vulgar sense—­be shocked.

Honora made several attempts at an answer before she succeeded in saying, simply, that Hugh was too absorbed in his work of reconstruction of the estate for them to have house-parties this autumn.  And even this was a concession hard for her pride to swallow.  She would have preferred not to reply at all, and this slightest of references to his work—­and hers —­seemed to degrade it.  Before she folded the sheet she looked again at that word “reconstruction” and thought of eliminating it.  It was too obviously allied to “redemption”; and she felt that Mrs. Kame could not understand redemption, and would ridicule it.  Honora went downstairs and dropped her reply guiltily into the mail-bag.  It was for Hugh’s sake she was sending it, and from his eyes she was hiding it.

And, while we are dealing with letters, one, or part of one, from Honora’s aunt, may perhaps be inserted here.  It was an answer to one that Honora had written a few days after her installation at Grenoble, the contents of which need not be gone into:  we, who know her, would neither laugh nor weep at reading it, and its purport may be more or less accurately surmised from her aunt’s reply.

“As I wrote you at the time, my dear,”—­so it ran “the shock which your sudden marriage with Mr. Chiltern caused us was great—­so great that I cannot express it in words.  I realize that I am growing old, and perhaps the world is changing faster than I imagine.  And I wrote you, too, that I would not be true to myself if I told you that what you have done was right in my eyes.  I have asked myself whether my horror of divorce and remarriage may