"There are chestnut horses and horse-chestnuts, chevaliers and chevaliers d'industrie, rois and rois d'Yvetot, Carrutherses and Chandos Cheveleys!" laughed Lady Cecil. "I understand, Lady Marabout. Il y a femmes et femmes—men about town and men about town, I shall learn all the classes and distinctions soon. But how is one to know the sheep that may be let into the fold from the wolves in sheep's clothing, that must be kept out of it? Your Ogre is really very distinguished-looking."
"Distinguished? Oh yes, my love; but the most distinguished men are the most objectionable sometimes. I assure you, my dear Cecil, I have seen an elder son whom sometimes I could hardly have told from his own valet, and a younger of the same family with the style of a D'Orsay. Why, did I not this very winter, when I went to stay at Rochdale, take Fitzbreguet himself, whom I had not chanced to see since he was a child, for one of the men out of livery, and bid him bring Bijou's basket out of the carriage. I did indeed—I who hate such mistakes more than any one! And Lionel, his second brother, has the beauty of an Apollo and the air noble to perfection. One often sees it; it's through the doctrine of compensation, I suppose, but it's very perplexing, and causes endless embrouillements."
"When the mammas fall in love with Lord Fitz's coronet, and the daughters with Lord Lionel's face, I suppose?" interpolated Lady Cecil.
"Exactly so, dear. As for knowing the sheep from the wolves, as you call them," went on Lady Marabout, sorting her embroidery silks, "you may very soon know more of Chandos Cheveley's class—(this Magenta braid is good for nothing; it's a beautiful color, but it fades immediately)—you meet them in the country at all fast houses, as they call them nowadays, like the Amandines'; they are constantly invited, because they are so amusing, or so dead a shot, or so good a whip, and live on their invitations, because they have no locale of their own. You see, all the women worth nothing admire, and all the women worth anything shun, them. They have a dozen accomplishments, and not a single reliable quality; a hundred houses open to them, and not a shooting-box of their own property or rental. You will meet this Chandos Cheveley everywhere, for instance, as though he were somebody desirable. You will see him in his club-window, as though he were born only to read the papers; in the Ride, mounted on a much better animal than Fitzbreguet, though the one pays treble the price he ought, and the other, I dare say, no price at all; at Ascot, on Amandine's or Goodwood's drag, made as much of among them all as if he were an heir-apparent to the throne; and yet, my love, that man hasn't a penny, lives Heaven knows where, and how he gets money to keep his cab and buy his gloves is, as I say, one of those mysteries of settling days, whist-tables, periodical writing, Baden coups de bonheur, and such-like fountains of such men's fortunes which we can never hope to penetrate—and very little we should benefit if we could! My dearest Cecil! if it is not ten minutes to five! We must go and drive at once."
Lady Ormsby was a great pet of Lady Marabout's; she had been so from a child; so much so, that when, the year after Valencia Valletort's discomfiture (a discomfiture so heavy and so public, that that young beauty was seized with a fit of filial devotion, attended her mamma to Nice, and figured not in Belgravia the ensuing season, and even Lady Marabout's temper had been slightly soured by it, as you perceive), another terrible charge was shifted on her shoulders by an appeal from the guardians of the late Earl of Rosediamond's daughter for her to be brought out under the Marabout wing, she had consented, and surrendered herself to be again a martyr to responsibility for the sake of Cecil and Cecil's lost mother. The young lady was a beauty; she was worse, she was an heiress; she was worse still, she was saucy, wayward, and notable for a strong will of her own—a more dangerous young thorough-bred was never brought to a gentler Rarey; and yet she was the first charge of this nature that Lady Marabout had ever accepted in the whole course of her life with no misgivings and with absolute pleasure. First, she was very fond of Cecil Ormsby; secondly, she longed to efface her miserable failure with Valencia by a brilliant success, which should light up all the gloom of her past of chaperonage; thirdly, she had a sweet and long-cherished diplomacy nestling in her heart to throw her son and Lord Rosediamond's daughter together, for the eventual ensnaring and fettering of Carruthers, which policy nothing could favor so well as having the weapon for that deadly purpose in her own house through April, May, and June.
Cecil Ormsby was a beauty and an heiress—spirited, sarcastic, brilliant, wilful, very proud; altogether, a more spirited young filly never needed a tight hand on the ribbons, a light but a firm seat, and a temperate though judicious use of the curb to make her endure being ridden at all, even over the most level grass countries of life. And yet, for the reasons just mentioned, Lady Marabout, who never had a tight hand upon anything, who is to be thrown in a moment by any wilful kick or determined plunge, who is utterly at the mercy of any filly that chooses to take the bit between her own teeth and bolt off, and is entirely incapable of using the curb, even to the most ill-natured and ill-trained Shetland that ever deserved to have its mouth sawed,—Lady Marabout undertook the jockeyship without fear.
"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.