Carruthers opened his eyes wide.
"My dear mother, you know I never dance! I come to balls to oblige my hostesses and look at the women, but not to carry a seven-stone weight of tulle illusion and white satin, going at express pace, with the thermometer at 80 deg., and a dense crowd jostling one at every turn in the circle. Bien obligé! that's not my idea of pleasure; if it were the Pyrrhic dance, now, or the Tarantella, or the Bolero, under a Castilian chestnut-tree——"
"Hold your tongue! You might have danced for once, just to have kept her from Chandos Cheveley."
"From the best waltzer in London? Not so selfish. Ask Amandine's wife if women don't like to dance with that fellow!"
"I should be very sorry to mention his name to her, or any of her set," responded Lady Marabout, getting upon certain virtuous stilts of her own, which she was given to mount on rare occasion and at distant intervals, always finding them very uncomfortable and unsuitable elevations, and being as glad to cast them off as a traveller to kick off the échasses he has had to strap on over the sandy plains of the Landes.
"What could possess you to introduce him to Cecil, Philip? It was careless, silly, unlike you; you know how I dislike men of his—his—objectionable stamp," sighed Lady Marabout, the white and gold namesakes in her coiffure softly trembling a gentle sigh in the perfumy zephyr raised by the rotatory whirl of the waltzers, among whom she watched with a horrible fascination, as one watches a tiger being pugged out of its lair, or a deserter being led out to be shot, Chandos Cheveley, waltzing Rosediamond's priceless daughter down the ball-room.
"He is so dreadfully handsome! I wonder why it is that men and women, who have no fortune but their faces, will be so dangerously, so obstinately, so provokingly attractive as one sees them so often!" thought Lady Marabout, determining to beat an immediate retreat from the present salons, since they were infested by the presence of her Ogre, to Lady Hautton's house in Wilton Crescent.
Lady Hautton headed charitable bazaars, belonged to the Cummingite nebulæ, visited Homes and Hospitals (floating to the bedside of luckless feminine patients to read out divers edifying passages, whose effect must have been somewhat neutralized to the hearers, one would imagine, by the envy-inspiring rustle of her silks, the flash of her rings, and the chimes of her bracelets, chains, and châtelaine), looked on the "Amandine set" as lost souls, and hence "did not know" Chandos Cheveley—a fact which, though the Marabout and Hautton antagonism was patent to all Belgravia, served to endear her all at once to her foe; Lady Marabout, like a good many other people, being content to sink personal resentment, and make a truce with the infidels for the sake of enjoying a mutual antipathy—that closest of all links of union!
Lady Marabout and Lady Hautton were foes, but they were dear Helena and dear Anne, all the same; dined at each other's tables, and smiled in each other's faces. They might be private foes, but they were public friends; and Lady Marabout beat a discreet retreat to the Hautton's salons—"so many engagements" is so useful a plea!—and from the Hautton she passed on to a ball at the Duke of Doncaster's; and, as at both, if Lady Cecil Ormsby did not move "a goddess from above," she moved a brilliant, sparkling, nonchalante, dangerous beauty, with some of her sex's faults, all her sex's witcheries, and more than her sex's mischief, holding her own royally, saucily, and proudly, and Chandos Cheveley was encountered no more, but happily detained at petit souper in a certain Section of the French Embassy, Lady Marabout drove homewards, in the gray of the morning, relieved, complacent, and gratified, dozing deliciously, till she was woke up with a start.
"Lady Marabout, what a splendid waltzer your Ogre, Chandos Cheveley, is!"