"Hold your tongue! You might have danced for once, just to have kept her from Chandos Cheveley."
"From the best waltzer in London? Not so selfish. Ask Amandine's wife if women don't like to dance with that fellow!"
"I should be very sorry to mention his name to her, or any of her set," responded Lady Marabout, getting upon certain virtuous stilts of her own, which she was given to mount on rare occasion and at distant intervals, always finding them very uncomfortable and unsuitable elevations, and being as glad to cast them off as a traveller to kick off the _échasses_ he has had to strap on over the sandy plains of the Landes.
"What could possess you to introduce him to Cecil, Philip? It was careless, silly, unlike you; you know how I dislike men of his--his--objectionable stamp," sighed Lady Marabout, the white and gold namesakes in her coiffure softly trembling a gentle sigh in the perfumy zephyr raised by the rotatory whirl of the waltzers, among whom she watched with a horrible fascination, as one watches a tiger being pugged out of its lair, or a deserter being led out to be shot, Chandos Cheveley, waltzing Rosediamond's priceless daughter down the ball-room.
"He is so dreadfully handsome! I wonder why it is that men and women, who have no fortune but their faces, will be so dangerously, so obstinately, so provokingly attractive as one sees them so often!" thought Lady Marabout, determining to beat an immediate retreat from the present salons, since they were infested by the presence of her Ogre, to Lady Hautton's house in Wilton Crescent.
Lady Hautton headed charitable bazaars, belonged to the Cummingite nebulæ, visited Homes and Hospitals (floating to the bedside of luckless feminine patients to read out divers edifying passages, whose effect must have been somewhat neutralized to the hearers, one would imagine, by the envy-inspiring rustle of her silks, the flash of her rings, and the chimes of her bracelets, chains, and châtelaine), looked on the "Amandine set" as lost souls, and hence "did not know" Chandos Cheveley--a fact which, though the Marabout and Hautton antagonism was patent to all Belgravia, served to endear her all at once to her foe; Lady Marabout, like a good many other people, being content to sink personal resentment, and make a truce with the infidels for the sake of enjoying a mutual antipathy--that closest of all links of union!