TJie Real Charlotte. 341 



Dislike, as has been said, was a sentiment that Francie 

 found great difficulty in cultivating. She conducted a feud 

 in the most slipshod way, with intervals of illogical friend- 

 ship, of which anyone with proper self-respect would have 

 been ashamed, and she consequently accepted, without 

 reservation, the fact that Charlotte was making herself 

 pleasant with a pleasantness that a more suspicious person 

 would have felt to be unwholesome. 



Charlotte, upon whose birth so many bad fairies had shed 

 their malign influence, had had at all events one attraction 

 bestowed upon her, the gift of appreciation, and of being 

 able to express her appreciation — a faculty that has been 

 denied to many good and Christian people. The evil spirit 

 may have torn her at sight of Francie enthroned at the head 

 of Roddy Lambert's table, but it did not come out of her in 

 any palpable form, nor did it prevent her from enjoying to 

 the utmost the change from the grease and smoke of Norry's 

 cooking, and the slothful stupidity of the Protestant orphan. 

 Charlotte was one of the few women for whom a good cook 

 will exert herself to make a savoury ; and Eliza Hackett 

 felt rewarded when the parlour-maid returned to the kitchen 

 with the intelligence that Miss Mullen had taken two help- 

 ings of cheese-souffle, and had sent her special compliments 

 to its constructor. Another of the undoubted advantages 

 of Rosemount was the chance it afforded Charlotte of paying 

 off with dignity and ease the long arrears of visits that the 

 growing infirmities of the black horse were heaping up 

 against her. It was supremely bitter to hear Francie 

 ordering out the waggonette as if she had owned horses and 

 carriages all her life, but she could gulp it down for the sake 

 of the compensating comfort and economy. In the long 

 tUe-a-tetes that these drives involved, Charlotte made herself 

 surprisingly pleasant to her hostess. She knew every 

 scandal about every family in the neighbourhood, and 

 imparted them with a humour and an easy acquaintance 

 with the aristocracy that was both awe-inspiring and en- 

 couraging to poor Francie, whose heart beat fast with shyness 

 and conscious inferiority, as, card-case in hand, she preceded 

 Miss Mullen to Mrs. Ffolliott's or Mrs. Flood's drawing- 

 room. It modified the terror of Mrs. Flood's hooked nose 

 to remember that her mother had been a Hebrew barmaid, 



