Here diplomacy was not policy, for, as my sagacious reader has perhaps divined, Sir Charles Pomander was after her himself.
CHAPTER III.
YES, Sir Charles was after Mrs. Woffington. I use that phrase because it is a fine generic one, suitable to different kinds of love-making.
Mr. Vane's sentiments were an inexplicable compound; but respect, enthusiasm, and deep admiration were the uppermost.
The good Sir Charles was no enigma. He had a vacancy in his establishment—a very high situation, too, for those who like that sort of thing—the head of his table, his left hand when he drove in the Park, etc. To this he proposed to promote Mrs. Woffington. She was handsome and witty, and he liked her. But that was not what caused him to pursue her; slow, sagacious, inevitable as a beagle.
She was celebrated, and would confer great eclat on him. The scandal of possessing her was a burning temptation. Women admire celebrity in a man; but men adore it in a woman.
“The world,” says Philip, “is a famous man; What will not women love so taught?”
I will try to answer this question.
The women will more readily forgive disgusting physical deformity for Fame's sake than we. They would embrace with more rapture a famous orang-outang than we an illustrious chimpanzee; but when it comes to moral deformity the tables are turned.