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to guard your sinister side. Sinister in the heraldic sense, that is. Your left side is all I meant. In any case, this will be either the makings or ruin of you. If you mean to abandon yourself to a life of dissipation, you might as well do it quickly and have done. While you live in limbo, your relatives all worry about you. If, on the other hand, you reform, then we shall all rejoice and trot out the fatted calf, in the usual way of greeting a reformed profligate son—or daughter. Which is it to be, Lady Barbara?”
    “I am not a profligate, thank you very much for the description. Neither am I an eighty-year-old relict, to be consigned to Mecklenberg Square and Bible readings three times a day. I have borne it for forty-eight hours, which is about forty-seven and a half more than you could do, and my patience is at an end. I want you to send me somewhere else. Anywhere else. This is too much.”
    “I confess I chose the most upstanding of my relatives to test you. You did better than I had any reason to expect. Consider it an ordeal by fire—endure it a little longer and I shall let you go to Lady Withers. It is the measles after all, confirmed beyond a doubt now. Before too long it will be safe for you to go there. Agreed?”
    “You cannot have been listening, Clivedon. I said my patience is at an end now. I will not eat another soft pudding or another crust to curl my hair; I will not be chided like a schoolgirl, and I will not go to bed at nine o’clock. Don’t think you’re going to make a Miss Mabel Mouse out of me !”
    “Dear girl, no one tries to make dross from gold.”
    “Compliments are cheap, and ineffective. I will not stay another day. It is up to you whether you wish to be saddled with a female of undoubtedly tarnished reputation, as opposed to the ambiguous patina I seem to wear at the moment. Don’t think I mean to back down. I don’t. I hold cards of invitation to a ball at Farrow’s tonight and a rout at Lady Sefton’s the next. I have been invited to a picnic at Richmond Park—”
    “You are apt to miss that date. Richmond Park, if I recall aright, is easily forgotten by you.”
    “I can’t imagine what you are talking about,” she answered, glancing off to the left to wave at a passing acquaintance, to conceal the flush she felt creeping up her neck. Two years, and he still remembered!
    She waited to hear what he would say about it, but the subject was dropped like a hot coal. “As it happens, I plan to attend Sefton’s rout and the Farrows’ ball myself. I shall take you.”
    This was the sort of time she had envisioned, and her lips turned up softly at the corners. “Will Lady Angela permit it?” she asked boldly.
    “I am hardly in a position to ask her permission for anything, I trust she will not object to your coming along with us.”
    “I shan’t mind having her along either, to keep me nice and proper. Lady Graham has a high opinion of her, I can tell you. If ever you wish to trim her into line after the wedding, send her to Lady Graham. They will deal famously.”
    “We do not speak of a wedding yet, and it is in any case unlikely in the extreme she would ever require trimming into line.”
    “No, waking up is more like it.”
    He got astride his high horse at this remark and asked, “What was it about your money you wished to discuss?”
    “I want you to arrange funds for me. I owe Mademoiselle Celeste twenty guineas for bonnets, and as I mean to buy a new one this week as well, I ought to pay her something on my account.”
    “Don’t worry about your accounts. I have taken care of all that. As to a new bonnet, however, that will be impossible. I have already told you I have cut off your accounts. There is nothing wrong with the bonnet you are wearing. You don’t require a new one.”
    “Do you intend overseeing my wardrobe as well as my accounts? Next you will be selecting my gowns.”
    “Censoring, not selecting. I had Agnes go through your trunks before