"It's to divert her mind," my friend replied, reddening again a little, I thought.

"We shall go next week: I've only waited to see how your mother would be before starting." I expressed to her hereupon my sense of her extraordinary merit and also that of the inconceivability of Flora's fancying herself still in a situation not to jump at the chance of marrying a man like Dawling.

"She says he's too ugly; she says he's too dreary; she says in fact he's 'nobody,'" Mrs.Meldrum pursued.

"She says above all that he's not 'her own sort.' She doesn't deny that he's good, but she finds him impossibly ridiculous.

He's quite the last person she would ever dream of." I was almost disposed on hearing this to protest that if the girl had so little proper feeling her noble suitor had perhaps served her right; but after a while my curiosity as to just how her noble suitor _had_ served her got the better of that emotion, and I asked a question or two which led my companion again to apply to him the invidious term I have already quoted.