"But I don't want to leave mother," I replied.
"Nonsense! that cavalier of hers, that delightful young man, how handsome and distinguished looking he is! will take care of her. What do you say his name is—Randolph, Randolph—let me think, it is a good name. Do you know anything about him?"
"Nothing whatever, he happens to be one of our boarders," I replied. "He has taken a fancy to mother, and gave us tickets and brought us to this box to-night."
Jasmine looked me all over.
"I must say you have not at all the appearance of a young woman who has stepped down in the social scale," she remarked. "What a pretty dress that is, and you have a nicer colour than ever in your cheeks. Do you know that you are a very handsome girl?"
"You have told me so before, but I detest compliments," was my brusque rejoinder.
"Oh! I can see that you are as queer and eccentric as ever. Now I tell you what it is, it is my opinion that you're not poor at all, and that you are doing all this for a freak."
"And suppose that were the case, what difference would it make?" I inquired.
"Oh! in that case," answered Lady Thesiger, "your friends would simply think you eccentric, and love you more than ever. It is the fashion to be eccentric now, it is poverty that crushes, you must know that."
"Yes," I answered with bitterness, "it is poverty that crushes. Well, then, from that point of view we are crushed, for we are desperately poor. But in our present nice comfortable house, even contaminated as we are by our paying guests, we do not feel our poverty, for we have all the good things of life around us, and the whole place seems very flourishing. Why don't you come to see us, Jasmine?"