"But, my love, it was a wonderful compliment from him!"
"Was it? I do not see any compliment in those vain, impertinent, Brummelian amour-propreisms. I must coin the word, there is no good one to express it."
"But, my dear Flora, you know he is the Marquis of Goodwood, the Duke of Doncaster's son! It is not as if he were a boy in the Lancers, or an unfledged petit maître from the Foreign Office——"
"Were he her Majesty's son, he should not gratify his vanity at my expense! If he expected me to be flattered by his condescension, he mistook me very much. He has been allowed to adopt that tone, I suppose; but from a man to a woman a chivalrous courtesy is due, though the man be an emperor."
"Perhaps so—of course; but that is their tone nowadays, my love, and you cannot alter it. I always say the Regency-men inaugurated it, and their sons and grandsons out-Herod Herod. But to turn a tide, or be a wit with impunity, a woman wants to occupy a prominent and unassailable position. Were you the Duchess of Amandine, you might say that sort of thing, but a young girl just out must not—indeed she must not! The Hauttons heard you, and the Hauttons are very merciless people; perfectly bred themselves, and pitiless on the least infringement of the convenances. Besides, ten to one you may have gained Goodwood's ill-will; and he is a man whose word has immense weight, I assure you."
"I do not see anything remarkable in him to give him weight," said the literal and unimpressible little Montolieu. "He is a commonplace person to my taste, neither so brilliant nor so handsome by a great deal as many gentlemen I see—as Sir Philip, for instance, Lady Marabout?"
"An my son? No, my love, he is not; very few men have Philip's talents and person," said Lady Marabout, consciously mollified and propitiated, but going on, nevertheless, with a Spartan impartiality highly laudable "Goodwood's rank, however, is much higher than Philip's (at least it stands so, though really the Carruthers are by far the older, dating as far back as Ethelbert II., while the Doncaster family are literally unknown till the fourteenth century, when Gervaise d'Ascotte received the acolade before Ascalon from Godfrey de Bouillon); Goodwood has great weight, my dear, in the best circles. A compliment from him is a great compliment to any woman, and the sort of answer you gave him——"
"Must have been a great treat to him, dear Lady Marabout, if every one is in the habit of kow-towing before him. Princes, you know, are never so happy as when they can have a little bit of nature; and my speech must have been as refreshing to Lord Goodwood as the breath of his Bearnese breezes and the freedom of his Pyrenean forests were to Henri Quatre after the court etiquette and the formal ceremonial of Paris."
"I don't know about its being a treat to him, my dear; it was more likely to be a shower-bath. And your illustration isn't to the point. The Bearnese breezes were Henri Quatre's native air, and might be pleasant to him; but the figurative ones are not Goodwood's, and I am sure cannot please him."
"But, Lady Marabout, I do not want to please him!" persisted the young lady, perversely. "I don't care in the least what he thinks, or what he says of me!"