I was so accustomed to seeing my sisters-in-law compassed about by a cloud of young men who appeared to admire them both equally, and to whom they appeared to apportion their favours with indiscriminate camaraderie, that the idea of one admirer stealing a march on all the others seemed a little unfair, somehow.

As Dolly remarked, it would break up the firm horribly.

"You see," she confided to me rather plaintively, "Dilly will have no use for them now, and they'll have still less use for her—an engaged girl beside other girls is about as exciting as a tapioca-pudding at a Lord Mayor's Banquet—and they will only have me. That won't be half the fun."

"I should have thought that your fun would have been exactly doubled," I said.

"Not a bit. How like a man! Don't you see, the fun used to be in playing them backwards and forwards between our two selves—like ping-pong, you know! It was clinking!"

She sighed regretfully.

"Now I shall either have to avoid men or marry them," she concluded, vaguely but regretfully. "Before, if they got in the way, I could always volley them back to Dilly. Now—one can't play ping-pong all by oneself!"

III.