Their companions were dispersed, some in the other room, and for the occupants of the Duchess's sofa they made, as a couple in communion, a picture, framed and detached, vaguely reduplicated in the high polish of the French floor.

"She IS tremendously pretty." The Duchess appeared to drop this as a plea for indulgence and to be impelled in fact by the interlocutor's silence to carry it further.

"I've never at all thought, you know, that Nanda touches her." Mr.Longdon demurred.

"Do you mean for beauty ?" His friend, for his simplicity, discriminated.

"Ah they've neither of them 'beauty.' That's not a word to make free with.