To be a perfect woman of the world, I take it, ladies must weed out early in life all such little contemptible weaknesses as a dislike to wounding other people; and a perfect woman of the world, therefore, Lady Marabout was not, and never would be. Nohow could she acquire Anne Hautton's invaluable sneer—nohow could she imitate that estimable pietist's delightful way of dropping little icy-barbed sentences, under which I have known the bravest to shrink, frozen, out of her path. Lady Marabout was grieved if she broke the head off a flower needlessly, and she could not cure herself of the same lingering folly in disliking to say a thing that pained anybody; it is incidental to the De Bonc[oe]ur blood—Carruthers inherits it—and I have seen fellows spared through it, whom he could else have withered into the depths of their boots by one of his satirical mots. So she did not go to her task of speaking to Chandos Cheveley, armed at all points for the encounter, and taking pleasure in feeling the edge of her rapier, as Lady Hautton would have done. The Cobra was dangerous, and must be crushed, but Lady Marabout did not very much relish setting her heel on it; it was a glittering, terrible, much-to-be-feared, and much-to-be-abused serpent,—but it might feel all the same, you see.
"I dislike the man on principle, but I don't want to pain him," she thought, sighing for the Hautton stern savoir faire and Achilles impenetrability, and goading herself on with the remembrance of duty and General Ormsby, when the opportunity she had resolved to seek presented itself accidentally at a breakfast at Lady George Frangipane's toy villa at Fulham, and she found herself comparatively alone in the rose-garden with Cheveley, for once without Cecil's terrible violet eyes upon her.
"Will you allow me a few words with you, Mr. Cheveley?" she asked, in her blandest manner—the kindly hypocrite!
The blow must be dealt, but it might as well be softened with a few chloroform fumes, and not struck savagely with an iron-spiked mace.
Cheveley raised his eyes.
"With me? With the greatest pleasure!"
"He is a mere fortune-hunter. I will not spare him, I am resolved," determined Lady Marabout, as she toyed with her parasol-handle, remarked incidentally how unequalled Lady George was in roses, especially in the tea-rose, and dealt blow No. 1. "Mr. Cheveley, I am going to speak to you very frankly. I consider frankness in all things best, myself——"
Cheveley bowed, and smiled slightly.
"I wish he would answer, it would make it so much easier; he will only look at one with those eyes of his, and certainly they are splendid!" thought Lady Marabout, as she went on quickly, on the same principle as the Chasseurs Indiens approach an abattis at double-quick. "When Lord Rosediamond died last year he left, as probably you are aware, his daughter in my sole care; it was a great responsibility—very great—and I feel, of course, that I shall have to answer to him for my discharge of it."
Lady Marabout didn't say whether Rosediamond was accustomed to visit her per medium, and hear her account of her stewardship nightly through a table-claw; but we must suppose that he was. Cheveley bowed again, and didn't inquire, not being spiritually interested.