“Place them on my dressing table. I do not like them so close.”

Mary obediently removed them there and disobediently began to rearrange them a little before turning to smile at the suspicious Ernestina.

“Did he bring them himself?”

“No, miss.”

“Where is Mr. Charles?”

“Doan know, miss. I didn’ ask’un.” But her mouth was pressed too tightly together, as if she wanted to giggle.

“But I heard you speak with the man.”

“Yes, miss.”

“What about?”

“’Twas just the time o’ day, miss.”

“Is that what made you laugh?”

“Yes, miss. ‘Tis the way ‘e speaks, miss.”

The Sam who had presented himself at the door had in fact borne very little resemblance to the mournful and indignant young man who had stropped the razor. He had thrust the handsome bouquet into the mischievous Mary’s arms. “For the bootiful young lady hupstairs.” Then dexterously he had placed his foot where the door had been about to shut and as dexterously produced from behind his back, in his other hand, while his now free one swept off his ^ la mode near-brimless topper, a little posy of crocuses. “And for the heven more lovely one down.” Mary had blushed a deep pink; the pressure of the door on Sam’s foot had mysteriously lightened. He watched her smell the yellow flowers; not politely, but genuinely, so that a tiny orange smudge of saffron appeared on the charming, impertinent nose.

“That there bag o’ soot will be delivered as bordered.” She bit her lips, and waited. “Hon one condition. No tick. Hit must be a-paid for at once.”

“’Ow much would’er cost then?”

The forward fellow eyed his victim, as if calculating a fair price; then laid a finger on his mouth and gave a profoundly unambiguous wink. It was this that had provoked that smothered laugh; and the slammed door.

Ernestina gave her a look that would have not disgraced Mrs. Poulteney. “You will kindly remember that he comes from London.”

“Yes, miss.”

“Mr. Smithson has already spoken to me of him. The man fancies himself a Don Juan.”

“What’s that then, Miss Tina?”

There was a certain eager anxiety for further information in Mary’s face that displeased Ernestina very much.

“Never mind now. But if he makes advances I wish to be told at once. Now bring me some barley water. And be more discreet in future.”

There passed a tiny light in Mary’s eyes, something singularly like a flash of defiance. But she cast down her eyes and her flat little lace cap, bobbing a token curtsy, and left the room. Three flights down, and three flights up, as Ernestina, who had not the least desire for Aunt Tranter’s wholesome but uninteresting barley water, consoled herself by remembering.

But Mary had in a sense won the exchange, for it reminded Ernestina, not by nature a domestic tyrant but simply a horrid spoiled child, that soon she would have to stop playing at mistress, and be one in real earnest. The idea brought pleasures, of course; to have one’s own house, to be free of parents… but servants were such a problem, as everyone said. Were no longer what they were, as everyone said. Were tiresome, in a word. Perhaps Ernestina’s puzzlement and distress were not far removed from those of Charles, as he had sweated and stumbled his way along the shore. Life was the correct apparatus; it was heresy to think otherwise; but meanwhile the cross had to be borne, here and now.

It was to banish such gloomy forebodings, still with her in the afternoon, that Ernestina fetched her diary, propped herself up in bed and once more turned to the page with the sprig of jasmine.

In London the beginnings of a plutocratic stratification of society had, by the mid-century, begun. Nothing of course took the place of good blood; but it had become generally accepted that good money and good brains could produce artificially a passable enough facsimile of acceptable social standing. Disraeli was the type, not the exception, of his times. Ernestina’s grandfather may have been no more than a well-to-do draper in Stoke Newington when he was young; but he died a very rich draper—much more than that, since he had moved commercially into central London, founded one of the West End’s great stores and extended his business into many departments besides drapery. Her father, indeed, had given her only what he had himself received: the best education that money could buy. In all except his origins he was impeccably a gentleman; and he had married discreetly above him, a daughter of one of the City’s most successful solicitors, who could number an Attorney-General, no less, among his not-too-distant ancestors. Ernestina’s qualms about her social status were therefore rather farfetched, even by Victorian standards; and they had never in the least troubled Charles.

“Do but think,” he had once said to her, “how disgracefully plebeian a name Smithson is.”

“Ah indeed—if you were only called Lord Brabazon Vavasour Vere de Vere—how much more I should love you!”

But behind her self-mockery lurked a fear.

He had first met her the preceding November, at the house of a lady who had her eye on him for one of her own covey of simperers. These young ladies had had the misfortune to be briefed by their parents before the evening began. They made the cardinal error of trying to pretend to Charles that paleontology absorbed them—he must give them the titles of the most interesting books on the subject—whereas Ernestina showed a gently acid little determination not to take him very seriously. She would, she murmured, send him any interesting specimens of coal she came across in her scuttle; and later she told him she thought he was very lazy. Why, pray? Because he could hardly enter any London drawing room without finding abundant examples of the objects of his interest.

To both young people it had promised to be just one more dull evening; and both, when they returned to their respective homes, found that it had not been so.

They saw in each other a superiority of intelligence, a lightness of touch, a dryness that pleased. Ernestina let it be known that she had found “that Mr. Smithson” an agreeable change from the dull crop of partners hitherto presented for her examination that season. Her mother made discreet inquiries; and consulted her husband, who made more; for no young male ever set foot in the drawing room of the house overlooking Hyde Park who had not been as well vetted as any modern security department vets its atomic scientists. Charles passed his secret ordeal with flying colors.

Now Ernestina had seen the mistake of her rivals: that no wife thrown at Charles’s head would ever touch his heart. So when he began to frequent her mother’s at homes and soirees he had the unusual experience of finding that there was no sign of the usual matrimonial trap; no sly hints from the mother of how much the sweet darling loved children or “secretly longed for the end of the season” (it was supposed that Charles would live permanently at Winsyatt, as soon as the obstacular uncle did his duty); or less sly ones from the father on the size of the fortune “my dearest girl” would bring to her husband. The latter were, in any case, conspicuously unnecessary; the Hyde Park house was fit for a duke to live in, and the absence of brothers and sisters said more than a thousand bank statements.

Nor did Ernestina, although she was very soon wildly determined, as only a spoiled daughter can be, to have Charles, overplay her hand. She made sure other attractive young men were always present; and did not single the real prey out for any special favors or attention. She was, on principle, never serious with him; without exactly saying so she gave him the impression that she liked him because he was fun—but of course she knew he would never marry. Then came an evening in January when she decided to plant the fatal seed.