Sous des maux ignorés nous fait gémir d'avance,
as Delphine Gay well phrased it. And she floated out of her boudoir to the dining-room for luncheon, at which unformal and pleasant meal Carruthers chanced to stay, criticise a new dry sherry, and take a look at this unsalable young filly of the Marabout Yearling Sales.
"I don't know about her being detrimental, mother, nor about her being little; she in more than middle height," laughed he; "but I vow she is the prettiest thing you've had in your list for some time. You've had much greater beauties, you say? Well, perhaps so; but I bet you any money she will make a sensation."
"I'm sure she will," reiterated Lady Marabout, despairingly. "I have no doubt she will have a brilliant season; there is something very piquante, taking, and uncommon about her; but who will marry her at the end of it?"
Carruthers shouted with laughter.
"Heaven forbid that I should attempt to prophesy! I would undertake as readily to say who'll be the owner of the winner of the Oaks ten years hence! I can tell you who won't——"
"Yourself; because you'll never marry anybody at all," cried Lady Marabout. "Well! I must say I should not wish you to renounce your misogamistic notions here. The Montolieus are not at all what you should look for; and a child like Flora would be excessively ill suited to you. If I could see you married, as I should desire, to some woman of weight and dignity, five or six-and-twenty, fit for you in every way——"
"De grace, de grace! My dear mother, the mere sketch will kill me, if you insist on finishing it! Be reasonable! Can anything be more comfortable, more tranquil, than I am now? I swing through life in a rocking-chair; if I'm a trifle bored now and then, it's my heaviest trial. I float as pleasantly on the waves of London life, in my way, as the lotus-eaters of poetry on the Ganges in theirs; and you'd have the barbarity to introduce into my complacent existence the sting of matrimony, the phosphorus of Hymen's torch, the symbolical serpent of a wedding-ring?—for shame!"
Lady Marabout laughed despite herself, and the solemnity, in her eyes, of the subject.
"I should like to see you happily married, for all that, though I quite despair of it now; but perhaps you are right."