“It does,” he agreed. His eyes alighted on the bed, and crinkled at the corners as he saw that the billowing curtains were of gauze. “Very dashing! Improper, too.”

An enchanting ripple of laughter broke from her. “Fudge! Do you think the room pretty?”

He came to sit beside her, raising her hands to his lips, and planting a kiss in its palm. “Yes, like yourself: pretty and absurd!”

“And like you!” she retorted.

He dropped her hand, not unnaturally revolted. “Good God—! No, Mama!”

“Well, absurd, at all events,” she amended, thinking, however, that it would have been impossible to have found two more handsome men than her twin sons.

The Polite World, to which they belonged, would have said, more temperately, that the Fancot twins were a good-looking pair, but by no means as handsome as had been their father. Neither had inherited the classical regularity of his features: they favoured their mother; and although she was an accredited Beauty dispassionate persons were agreed that her loveliness lay not so much in any perfection of countenance as in her vivacious charm. This, asserted her more elderly admirers, was comparable to the charm of the Fifth Duke of Devonshire’s first wife. There were other points of resemblance between her and the Duchess: she adored her children, and she was recklessly extravagant.

As for Kit Fancot, at four-and-twenty he was a well-built young man, slightly above the average height, with good shoulders, and an excellent leg for the prevailing fashion of skin-tight pantaloons. He was darker than his mother, his glossy locks showing more chestnut than gold; and there was a firmness about his mouth which hers lacked. But his eyes were very like hers: lively, their colour between blue and gray, and laughter rarely far from them. He had her endearing smile as well; and this, with his easy unaffected manners, made him a general favourite.