SEASON THE FIRST.—THE ELIGIBLE.
One of the kindest-natured persons that I ever knew on this earth, where kind people are as rare as black eagles or red deer, is Helena, Countess of Marabout, née De Bonc[oe]ur. She has foibles, she has weaknesses—who amongst us has not?—she will wear her dresses décolletées, though she's sixty, if Burke tells us truth; she will rouge and practise a thousand other little toilette tricks, but they are surely innocent, since they deceive nobody; and if you wait for a woman who is no artifices, I am afraid you shall have to forswear the sex in toto, my friends, and come growling back to your Diogenes' tub in the Albany, with your lantern still lit every day of your lives.
Lady Marabout is a very charming person. As for her weaknesses, she is all the nicer for them, to my taste. I like people with weaknesses myself; those without them do look so dreadfully scornfully and unsympathizingly upon one from the altitude of their superiority, de toute la hauteur de sa bêtise, as a witty Frenchman says. Humanity was born with weaknesses. If I were a beggar, I might hope for a coin from a man with some; a man without any, I know, would shut up his porte-monnaie, with an intensified click, to make me feel trebly envious, and consign me to D 15 and his truncheon, on the score of vagrancy.
Lady Marabout is a very charming person, despite her little foibles, and she gives very pleasant little dinners, both at her house in Lowndes Square and in her jointure villa at Twickenham, where the bad odors of Thames are drowned in the fragrance of the geraniums, piled in great heaps of red, white, and variegated blossom in the flowerbeds on the lawn. She has been married twice, but has only one son, by her first union—Carruthers, of the Guards—a very good fellow, whom his mother thinks perfection, though if she did know certain scenes in her adored Philip's life, the good lady might hesitate before she endowed her son with all the cardinal virtues as she does at the present moment. She has no daughters, therefore you will wonder to hear that the prime misery, burden, discomfort, and worry of her life is chaperonage. But so it is.
Lady Marabout is the essence of good nature; she can't say No: that unpleasant negative monosyllable was never heard to issue from her full, smiling, kind-looking lips: she is in a high position, she has an extensive circle, thanks to her own family and those of the baronet and peer she successively espoused; and some sister, or cousin, or friend, is incessantly hunting her up to bring out their girls, and sell them well off out of hand; young ladies being goods extremely likely to hang on hand nowadays.
"Of all troubles, the troubles of a chaperone are the greatest," said Lady Marabout to me at the wedding déjeûner of one of her protegées. "In the first place, one looks on at others' campaigns instead of conducting them one's self; secondly, it brings back one's own bright days to see the young things' smiles and blushes, like that girl's just now (I do hope she'll be happy!); and thirdly, one has all the responsibility, and gets all the blame if anything goes wrong. I'll never chaperone anybody again now I have got rid of Leila."
So does Lady Marabout say twenty times; yet has she invariably some young lady under her wing, whose relatives are defunct, or invalided, or in India, or out of society somehow; and we all of us call her house The Yard, and her (among ourselves) not Lady Marabout but Lady Tattersall. The worries she has in her chaperone's office would fill a folio, specially as her heart inclines to the encouragement of romance, but her reason to the banishment thereof; and while her tenderness suffers if she thwarts her protégées' leanings, her conscience gives her neuralgic twinges if she abets them to unwise matches while under her dragonnage.
"What's the matter, mother?" asked Carruthers, one morning. He's very fond of his mother, and will never let any one laugh at her in his hearing.
"Matter? Everything!" replied Lady Marabout, concisely and comprehensively, as she sat on the sofa in her boudoir, with her white ringed hands and her bien conservé look, and her kindly pleasant eyes and her rich dress; one could see what a pretty woman she has been, and that Carruthers may thank her for his good looks. "To begin with, Félicie has been so stupid as to marry; married the greengrocer (whom she will ruin in a week!), and has left me to the mercies of a stupid woman who puts pink with cerise, mauve with magenta, and sky-blue with azureline, and has no recommendation except that she is as ugly as the Medusa, and so will not tempt you to——"
"Make love to her, as I did to Marie," laughed Carruthers. "Marie was a pretty little dear; it was very severe in you to send her away."