"Mr. Alison is downstairs in the drawing-room with Miladi, Mademoiselle."
"I'll come down at once, Adèle. Please take this letter to the post."
Mac rose from his place on the hearthrug and waddled after his mistress.
THE WIFE
Chapter Four: The Wife
On a wet November afternoon a brougham drawn by a pair of gray horses and coming from the direction of Kensington drove along the Knightsbridge road and pulled up outside Lady Flower's house in King's Gate. From it alighted a young woman who by some indefinable effect of maturity, some sedate expression of achievement, revealed that she was married. The age at which women decide to be matrons varies like feminine fashions, and in the year 1890 English women still clung, if less tightly every year, to the fashion of a middle age as long as Queen Victoria's reign.