"I don't remember; but now, Phil, that you have seen her," said I, in a tone of tolerably-affected carelessness, "what do you think of la belle Cressingham?"
"She is very handsome, certainly," replied Phil, in the same undertone, and luckily looking at his glass, and not at me, "a splendid specimen of her class--a proud and by no means a bashful beauty."
"Most things in this world are prized just as they are difficult of attainment, or are scarce. I reckon beauty among these, and no woman holds it cheap," said I, not knowing exactly what to think of Caradoc's criticism. "There is Miss Lloyd, for instance--"
"Ah," said he, with honest animation, "she is a beauty too, but a gentle and retiring one--a girl that is all sweetness and genuine goodness of heart."
"With some dairy-farms in the midland counties, eh?"
"The graces of such a girl are always the most attractive. We men are so constituted that we are apt to decline admiration where it is loftily courted or seemingly expected--as I fear it is in the case of Lady Cressingham--and to bestow it on the gentle and retiring."
I felt there was much truth in my friend's remarks, and yet they piqued me so that I rather turned from him coldly for the remainder of the evening.
"Her mother is haughty, intensely ambitious, and looks forward to a title for her as high, if not higher, than that her father bore," I heard Sir Madoc say to a neighbour who had been talking on the same subject--the beauty of Lady, Estelle; "the old lady is half Irish and half Welsh."
"Rather a combustible compound, I should think," added Guilfoyle, as, after coffee and curaçoa, we all rose to join the ladies in the drawing-room.