"Chandos Cheveley getting up before noon! He _must_ mean something unusual!" thought her chaperone.
"Helena has set her heart on securing Cecil Ormsby for Carruthers. I hope she may succeed better than she did with poor Goodwood last season," laughed Lady Hautton, with her inimitable sneer, glancing at the young lady in question at a bazaar in Willis's Rooms, selling rosebuds for anything she liked to ask for them, and cigars tied up with blue ribbon a guinea the half-dozen, at the Marabout stall. Lady Hautton had just been paying a charitable visit to St. Cecilia's Refuge, of which she was head patroness, where, having floated in with much benignity, been worshipped by a select little toady troop, administered spiritual consolation with admirable condescension, and distributed illuminated texts for the adornment of the walls and refreshment of the souls, she was naturally in a Christian frame of mind towards her neighbors. Lady Marabout caught the remark--as she was intended to do--and thought it not quite a pleasant one; but, my good sir, did you ever know those estimable people, who spend all their time fitting themselves for another world, ever take the trouble to make themselves decently agreeable in the present one? The little pleasant courtesies, affabilities, generosities, and kindnesses, that rub the edge off the flint-stones of the Via Dolorosa, are quite beneath the attention of Mary the Saint, and only get attended to by Martha the Worldly, poor butterfly thing! who is fit for nothing more serviceable and profitable!
Lady Marabout _had_ set her heart on Cecil Ormsby's filling that post of honor--of which no living woman was deserving in her opinion--that of "Philip's wife;" an individual who had been, for so many years, a fond ideal, a haunting anxiety, and a dreaded rival, en même temps, to her imagination. She _was_ a little bit of a match-maker: she had, over and over again, arranged the most admirable and suitable alliances; alliances that would have shamed the scepticism of the world in general, as to the desirability of the holy bonds, and brought every refractory man to the steps of St. George's; alliances, that would have come off with the greatest éclat, but for one trifling hindrance and difficulty--namely, the people most necessary to the arrangements could never by any chance be brought to view them in the same light, and were certain to give her diplomacy the _croc-en-jambe_ at the very moment of its culminating glory and finishing finesses. She was a little bit of a match-maker--most kind-hearted women are; the tinder they play with is much better left alone, but _they_ don't remember that! Like children in a forest, they think they'll light a pretty bright fire, just for fun, and never remember what a seared, dreary waste that fire may make, or what a prairie conflagration it may stretch into before it's stopped.