"Cecil Ormsby is a terrible flirt," said Lady Hautton, to another lady, glancing at the rapid sale of the rosebuds and cigars, the bunches of violets and the sprays of lilies of the valley, in which that brilliant beauty was doing such thriving business at such extravagant profits, while the five Ladies Hautton presided solemnly over articles of gorgeous splendor, which threatened to be left on hand, and go in a tombola, as ignominiously as a beauty after half a dozen seasons, left unwooed and unwon, goes to the pêle-mêle raffle of German Bad society, and is sold off at the finish to an unknown of the Line, or a Civil Service fellow, with five hundred a year.
"Was Cecil a flirt?" wondered Lady Marabout. Lady Marabout was fain to confess to herself that she thought she was--nay, that she hoped she was. If it wasn't flirting, that way in which she smiled on Chandos Cheveley, sold him cigarettes, laughed with him over the ices and nectarines he fetched her, and positively invested him with the cordon d'honneur of a little bouquet of Fairy roses, for which twenty men sued, and he (give Satan his due) did not even ask--if it wasn't flirting, _what was it_? Lady Marabout shivered at the suggestion; and though she was, on principle, excessively severe on flirting, she could be very glad of what she didn't approve, when it aided her, on occasion--like most other people--and would so far have agreed with Talleyrand, as to welcome the worst crime (of coquetry) as far less a sin than the unpardonable blunder of encouraging an Ogre!
"I can't send Cecil away from the stall, as if she were a naughty child, and I can't order the man out of Willis's Rooms," thought that unhappy and fatally-worried lady, as she presided behind her stall, an emphatic witness of the truth of the poeticism that "grief smiles and gives no sign," insomuch as she looked the fairest, sunniest, best-looking, and best-tempered Dowager that ever shrouded herself in Chantilly lace.
"I do think those ineligible, detrimental, objectionable persons ought not to be let loose on society as they are," she pondered; "let them have their clubs and their mess breakfasts, their Ascot and their Newmarket, their lansquenet parties and their handicap pigeon matches, if they like; but to have them come amongst _us_ as they do, asked everywhere if they happen to have good blood and good style, free to waltz and flirt and sing, and show all sorts of attention to marriageable girls, while all the while they are no more available for anything serious than if they were club stewards or cabmen--creatures that live on their fashionable aroma, and can't afford to buy the very bottles of bouquets on their toilette-tables--fast men, too, who, knowing they can never marry themselves, make a practice of turning marriage into ridicule, and help to set all the rich men more dead against it than they are,--to have them come promiscuously among the very best people, with nothing to distinguish them as dangerous, or label them as 'ought to be avoided,'--it's dreadful! it's a social evil! it _ought_ to be remedied! They muzzle dogs in June, why can't they label Ogres in the season? I mustn't send poor little Bijou out for a walk in Kensington Gardens without a string, these men ought not to go about in society without restriction: a snap of Bijou's doesn't do half such mischief as a smile of theirs!"