"I think you have, mother. Val's indisputably handsome. You must tell her to make play with Goodwood or Nugent."
Lady Marabout unfurled her fan, and indignantly interrupted him:
"My dear Philip! do you suppose I would teach Valencia, or any girl under my charge, to lay herself out for any man, whoever or whatever it might be? I trust your cousin would not stoop to use such man[oe]uvres, did I even stoop to counsel them. Depend upon it, Philip, it is precisely those women who try to 'make play,' as you call it, with your sex that fail most to charm them. It is abominable the way in which you men talk, as if we all hunted you down, and would drive you to St. George's nolens volens!"
"So you would, mother," laughed Carruthers. "We 'eligible men' have a harder life of it than rabbits in a warren, with a dozen beagles after them. From the minute we're of age we're beset with traps for the unwary, and the spring-guns are so dexterously covered, with an inviting, innocent-looking turf of courtesies and hospitalities that it's next to a mural impossibility to escape them, let one retire into one's self, keep to monosyllables through all the courses of all the dinners and all the turns of all the valses, and avoid everything 'compromising,' as one may. I've suffered, and can tell you. I suffer still, though I believe and hope they are beginning to look on me as an incurable, given over to the clubs, the coulisses, and the cover-side. There's a fellow that's known still more of the peines fortes et dures than I. Goodwood's coming to ask for an introduction to Val, I would bet."
He was coming for that purpose, and, though Lady Marabout had so scornfully and sincerely repudiated her son's counsel relative to making play with Goodwood, blandly ignorant of her own weaknesses like a good many other people, Lady Marabout was not above a glow of chaperone gratification when she saw the glance of admiration which the Pet Eligible of the season bestowed on Valencia Valletort. Goodwood was a good-looking fellow—a clever fellow—though possibly he shone best alone at a mess luncheon, in a chat driving to Hornsey Wood, round the fire in a smoking-room, on a yacht deck, or anywhere where ladies of the titled world were not encountered, he having become afraid of them by dint of much persecution, as any October partridge of a setter's nose. He was passably good-looking, ordinarily clever, a very good fellow as I say, and—he was elder son of his Grace of Doncaster, which fact would have made him the desired of every unit of the beau sexe, had he been hideous as the Veiled Prophet or Brutal Gilles de Rayes. The Beauty often loves the Beast in our day, as in the days of fairy lore. We see that beloved story of our petticoat days not seldom acted out, and when there is no possibility of personal transmogrification and amelioration for the Beast moreover; only—the Beauty has always had whispered in her little ear the title she will win, and the revenues she will gain, and the cloth of gold she will wear, if she caresses Bruin the enamoured, swears his ugly head is god-like, and vows fidelity unswerving!
Goodwood was no uncouth Bruin, and he had strawberry-leaves in his gift; none of your lacquered, or ormolu, or silver-gilt coronets, such as are cast about nowadays with a liberality that reminds one of flinging a handful of halfpence from a balcony, where the nimblest beggar is first to get the prize; but of the purest and best gold; and Goodwood had been tried for accordingly by every woman he came across for the last dozen years. Women of every style and every order had primed all their rifles, and had their shot at him, and done their best to make a centre and score themselves as winner: belles and bas bleus, bewitching widows and budding débutantes, fast young ladies who tried to capture him in the hunting-field by clearing a bullfinch; saintly young ladies, who illuminated missals, and hinted they would like to take his conversion in hand; brilliant women, who talked at him all through a long rainy day, when Perthshire was flooded, and the black-fowl unattainable; showy women, who posê'd for him whole evenings in their opera-boxes, whole mornings in their boudoir—all styles and orders had set at him, till he had sometimes sworn in his haste that all women were man-traps, and that he wished to Heaven he were a younger son in the Foreign Office, or a poor devil in the Line, or anything, rather than what he was; the Pet Eligible of his day.
"Goodwood is certainly struck with her," thought Lady Marabout, as Despréaux disrobed her that night, running over with a retrogressive glance Valencia Valletort's successes at her first ball. "Very much struck, indeed, I should say. I will issue cards for another 'At Home.' As for 'making play' with him, as Philip terms it, of course that is only a man's nonsense. Valencia will need none of those trickeries, I trust; still, it is any one's duty to make the best alliance possible for such a girl, and—dear Adeliza would be very pleased."
With which amiable remembrance of her sister (whom, conceiving it her duty to love, Lady Marabout persuaded herself that she did love, from a common feminine opticism that there's an eleventh commandment which makes it compulsory to be attached to relatives n'importe of whatever degree of disagreeability, though Lady Honiton was about the most odious hypochondriac going, in a perpetual state of unremitting battle with the whole outer world in general, and allopathists, hom[oe]opathists, and hydropathists in especial), the most amiable lady in all Christendom bade Despréaux bring up her cup of coffee an hour earlier in the morning, she had so much to do! asked if Bijou had had some panada set down by his basket in case he wanted something to take in the night; wished her maid good night, and laid her head on her pillow as the dawn streamed through the shutters, already settling what bridal presents she should give her niece Valencia, when she became present Marchioness of Goodwood and prospective Duchess of Doncaster before the altar rails of St. George's.
"That's a decidedly handsome girl, that cousin of yours, Phil," said Goodwood, on the pavement before her Grace of Amandine's, in Grosvenor Place, at the same hour that night.
"I think she is counted like me!" said Carruthers. "Of course she's handsome; hasn't she De Bonc[oe]ur blood in her, my good fellow? We're all of us good-looking, always have been, thank God! If you're inclined to sacrifice, Goodwood, now's your time, and my mother'll be delighted. She's brought out about half a million of débutantes, I should say, in her time, and all of 'em have gone wrong, somehow; wouldn't go off at all, like damp gunpowder, or would go off too quick in the wrong direction, like a volunteer's rifle charge; married ignominiously, or married obstinately, or never excited pity in the breast of any man, but had to retire to single-blessedness in the country, console themselves with piety and an harmonium, and spread nets for young clerical victims. Give her a triumph at last, and let her have glory for once, as a chaperone, in catching you!"