"I dare say you wonder, after my grief with Valencia, that I have consented to bring another girl out, but when I heard it was poor Rosediamond's wish--his dying wish, one may almost say--that Cecil should make her début with me, what _was_ I to do, my dear?" she explained, half apologetically, to Carruthers, when the question was first agitated. Perhaps, too, Lady Marabout had in her heart been slightly sickened of perfectly trained young ladies brought up on the best systems, and admitted to herself that the pets of the foreign houses may _not_ be the most attractive flowers after all.
So Lady Cecil Ormsby was installed in Lowndes Square, and though she was the inheritor of her mother's wealth, which was considerable, and possessor of her own wit and beauty, which were not inconsiderable either, and therefore a prize to fortune-hunters and a lure to misogamists, as Lady Marabout knew very well how to keep the first off, and had her pet project of numbering her refractory son among the converted second, she rather congratulated herself than otherwise in having the pleasure and éclat of introducing her; and men voted the Marabout Yearlings Sale of that season, since it comprised Rosediamond's handsome daughter, as dangerous as a horse-dealer's auction to a young greenhorn, or a draper's "sale, without reserve, at enormous sacrifice," to a lady with a soul on bargains bent.
"How very odd! Just as we have been talking of him, there is that man again! I must bow to him, I suppose; though if there _be_ a person I dislike----" said Lady Marabout, giving a frigid little bend of her head as her barouche, with its dashing roans, rolled from her door, and a tilbury passed them, driving slowly through the square.
Cecil Ormsby bowed to its occupant with less severity, and laughed under the sheltering shadow of her white parasol-fringe.
"The Ogre has a very pretty trap, though, Lady Marabout, and the most delicious gray horse in it! Such good action!"
"If its action is good, my love, I dare say it is more than could be said of its master's actions. He is going to call on that Mrs. Maréchale, very probably; he was always there last season."
And Lady Marabout shook her head and looked grave, which, combined with the ever-damnatory demonstrative conjunction, blackened Mrs. Maréchale's moral character as much as Lady Marabout could blacken any one's, she loving as little to soil her own fingers and her neighbors' reputations with the indelible Italian chalk of scandal as any lady I know; being given, on the contrary, when compelled to draw any little social croquis of a back-biting nature, to sketch them in as lightly as she could, take out as many lights as possible, and rub in the shadows with a very chary and pitying hand, except, indeed, when she took the portrait of such an Ogre as Chandos Cheveley, when I can't say she was quite so merciful, specially when policy and prejudice combined to suggest that it would be best (and not unjust) to use the blackest Conté crayons obtainable.