Yet behind the gentleness, as even Lady Barnes knew, there were qualities and characteristics of a singular strength.
Lady Barnes indeed was complaining, and could not be stopped.
"You see, dear Mrs.French," she was saying, in a rapid, lowered voice, and with many glances at the door, "the trouble is that Daphne is never satisfied.

She has some impossible ideal in her mind, and then everything must be sacrificed to it.

She began with going into ecstasies over this dear old house, and now!--there's scarcely a thing in it she does not want to change.

Poor Edward and I spent thousands upon it, and we really flattered ourselves that we had some taste; but it is not good enough for Daphne!" The speaker settled herself in her chair with a slight but emphatic clatter of bangles and rustle of skirts.
"It's the ceilings, isn't it ?" murmured Elsie French, glancing at the heavy decoration, the stucco bosses and pendants above her head which had replaced, some twenty years before, a piece of Adam design, sparing and felicitous.
"It's everything!" Lady Barnes's tone was now more angry than fretful.
"I don't, of course, like to say it--but really Daphne's self-confidence is too amazing!" "She does know so much," said Elsie French reflectively.

"Doesn't she ?" "Well, if you call it knowing.