The Duchess, however, was very triumphant, and made her way back into the drawing-room with a step which seemed to declare loudly that she had trumped Mrs Sparkes at last.
Not long after this the ladies went up-stairs on their way to bed.
Many of them, perhaps, did not go to their pillows at once, as it was as yet not eleven o'clock, and it was past ten when they all came down to breakfast.

At any rate, Alice, who had been up at seven, did not go to bed then, nor for the next two hours.

"I'll come into your room just for one minute," Lady Glencora said as she passed on from the door to her own room; and in about five minutes she was back with her cousin.

"Would you mind going into my room--it's just there, and sitting with Ellen for a minute ?" This Lady Glencora said in the sweetest possible tone to the girl who was waiting on Alice; and then, when they were alone together, she got into a little chair by the fireside and prepared herself for conversation.
"I must keep you up for a quarter of an hour while I tell you something.

But first of all, how do you like the people?
Will you be able to be comfortable with them ?" Alice of course said that she thought she would; and then there came that little discussion in which the duties of Mr Bott, the man with the red hair, were described.
"But I've got something to tell you," said Lady Glencora, when they had already been there some twenty minutes.