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Had the Duchess ever been vain (she had never been so) she would have worn very high-heeled shoes and dieted madly. Years ago when the Duke married her she was pretty in a yellow blue-eyed canary kind of way. In those days what she lost in height she saved in aristocratic bearing, being the eldest daughter of Lord Medley, whose wife, as everyone knows, was for so long lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria.

Now she was dumpy and shapeless, with pale blue eyes, no eyebrows to speak of, and a strange round saucer of grey hair that stood over her puckered face like a turban. But her aristocratic bearing was still there. She never of course actively considered her ancestry, her present position—those were things too familiar to be thought of—but she was exceedingly quick to recognise anything that savoured of impertinence or discourtesy. Many a visitor ere now, resting happily on the easy and almost fraternal kindness of the Duke, had been arrested sharply by the sudden remote distinction of the Duchess. That turban of grey hair made up quite sufficiently for the absence of eyebrows, and those eyes, now so dimly blue, could be of a sudden terrible as daggers.