"Alice is not going."

"Then you can give Mrs. Marsham a seat in your carriage?"

"Impossible, Plantagenet. I thought I had told you that I had promised my cousin Jane."

"But you can take three."

"Indeed I can't,—unless you would like me to sit out with the coachman."

There was something in this,—a tone of loudness, a touch of what he called to himself vulgarity,—which made him very angry. So he turned away from her, and looked as black as a thundercloud.

"You must know, Plantagenet," she went on, "that it is impossible for three women dressed to go out in one carriage. I am sure you wouldn't like to see me afterwards if I had been one of them."

"You need not have said anything to Lady Jane when Miss Vavasor refused. I had asked you before that."

"And I had told you that I liked going with young women, and not with old ones. That's the long and the short of it."

"Glencora, I wish you would not use such expressions."