"Flora, soft and careless, and rebellious as she looks, is ambitious, and has set her heart on winning Goodwood, I do believe, as much as ever poor Valencia did. True, she takes a different plan of action, as Philip would call it, and treats him with gay nonchalante indifference, which certainly seems to pique him more than ever my poor niece's beauty and quiet deference to his opinions did; but that is because she reads him better, and knows more cleverly how to rouse him. She has set her heart on winning Goodwood, I am certain, ambitious as it seems. How eagerly she looked out for the Blues yesterday at that Hyde Park inspection—though I am sure Goodwood does not look half so handsome as Philip does in harness, as they call it; Philip is so much the finer man! I will just sound her to-day—or to-night as we come back from the opera," thought Lady Marabout, one morning.
Things were moving to the very best of her expectations. Learning experience from manifold failures, Lady Marabout had laid her plans this time with a dexterity that defied discomfiture: seconded by both the parties primarily necessary to the accomplishment of her man[oe]uvres, with only a little outer-world opposition to give it piquancy and excitement, she felt that she might defy the fates to checkmate her here. This should be her Marathon and Lemnos, which, simply reverted to, should be sufficient to secure her immunity from the attacks of any feminine Xantippus who should try to rake up her failures and tarnish her glory. To win Goodwood with a nobody's daughter would be a feat as wonderful in its way as for Miltiades to have passed "in a single day and with a north wind," as Oracle exacted, to the conquest of the Pelasgian Isles; and Lady Marabout longed to do it, as you, my good sir, may have longed in your day to take a king in check with your only available pawn, or win one of the ribands of the turf with a little filly that seemed to general judges scarcely calculated to be in the first flight at the Chester Consolation Scramble.
Things were beautifully in train; it even began to dawn on the perceptions of the Hauttons, usually very slow to open to anything revolutionary and unwelcome. Her Grace of Doncaster, a large, lethargic, somnolent dowager, rarely awake to anything but the interests and restoration of the old ultra-Tory party in a Utopia always dreamed of and never realized, like many other Utopias political and poetical, public and personal, had turned her eyes on Flora Montolieu, and asked her son the question inevitable, "Who is she?" to which Goodwood had replied with a devil-may-care recklessness and a headlong indefiniteness which grated on her Grace's ears, and imparted her no information whatever: "One of Lady Tattersall's yearlings, and the most charming creature I ever met. You know that? Why did you ask me, then? You know all I do, and all I care to do!"—a remark that made the Duchess wish her very dear and personal friend, Lady Marabout, were comfortably and snugly interred in the mausoleum of Fern Ditton, rather than alive in the flesh in Belgravia, chaperoning young ladies whom nobody knew, and who were not to be found in any of Sir E. Burke's triad of volumes.
Belgravia, and her sister Mayfair, wondered at it, and talked over it, raked up the parental Montolieu lineage mercilessly, and found out, from the Bishop of Bonviveur and Sauceblanche, that the uncle on the distaff side had been only a Tug at Eton, and had lived and died at Fern Ditton a perpetual curate and nothing else—not even a dean, not even a rector! Goodwood couldn't be serious, settled the coteries. But the more hints, innuendoes, questions, and adroitly concealed but simply suggested animadversion Lady Marabout received, the greater was her glory, the warmer her complacency, when she saw her Little Montolieu, who was not little at all, leading, as she undoubtedly did lead, the most desired eligible of the day captive in her chains, sent bouquets by him, begged for waltzes by him, followed by him at the Ride, riveting his lorgnon at the Opera, monopolizing his attention—though, clever little intriguer, she knew too well how to pique him ever to let him monopolize hers.
"She certainly makes play, as Philip would call it, admirably with Goodwood," said Lady Marabout, admiringly, at a morning party, stirring a cup of Orange Pekoe, yet with a certain irrepressible feeling that she should almost prefer so very young a girl not to be quite so adroit a schemer at seventeen. "That indifference and nonchalance is the very thing to pique and retain such a courted fastidious creature as Goodwood; and she knows it, too. Now a clumsy casual observer might even fancy that she liked some others—even you, Philip, for instance—much better; she talks to you much more, appeals to you twice as often, positively teases you to stop and lunch or come to dinner here, and really told you the other night at the Opera she missed you when you didn't come in the morning; but to anybody who knows anything of the world, it is easy enough to see which way her inclinations (yes, I do hope it is inclination as well as ambition—I am not one of those who advocate pure mariages de convenance; I don't think them right, indeed, though they are undoubtedly very expedient sometimes) turn. I do not think anybody ever could prove me to have erred in my quick-sightedness in those affairs. I may have been occasionally mistaken in other things, or been the victim of adverse and unforeseen circumstances which were beyond my control, and betrayed me; but I know no one can read a girl's heart more quickly and surely than I, or a man's either, for that matter."
"Oh, we all know you are a clairvoyante in heart episodes, my dear mother; they are the one business of your life!" smiled Carruthers, setting down his ice, and lounging across the lawn to a group of cedars, where Flora Montolieu stood playing at croquet, and who, like a scheming adventuress, as she was, immediately verified Lady Marabout's words, and piqued Goodwood à outrance by avowing herself tired of the game, and entering with animated verve into the prophecies for Ascot with Carruthers, whose bay filly Sunbeam, sister to Wild-Falcon, was entered to run for the Queen's Cup.
"What an odd smile that was of Philip's," thought Lady Marabout, left to herself and her Orange Pekoe. "He has been very intimate with Goodwood ever since they joined the Blues, cornets together, three-and-twenty years ago; surely he can't have heard him drop anything that would make him fancy he was not serious?"
An idle fear, which Lady Marabout dismissed contemptuously from her mind when she saw how entirely Goodwood—in defiance of the Hauttons' sneer, the drowsy Duchess's unconcealed frown, all the comments sure to be excited in feminine minds, and all the chaff likely to be elicited from masculine lips at the mess-table, and in the U. S., and in the Guards' box before the curtain went up for the ballet—vowed himself to the service of the little detrimental throughout that morning party, and spoke a temporary adieu, whose tenderness, if she did not exactly catch, Lady Marabout could at least construe, as he pulled up the tiger-skin over Flora's dainty dress, before the Marabout carriage rolled down the Fulham Road to town. At which tenderness of farewell Carruthers—steeled to all such weaknesses himself—gave a disdainful glance and a contemptuous twist of his moustaches, as he stood by the door talking to his mother.
"You too, Phil?" said Goodwood, with a laugh, as the carriage rolled away.
Carruthers stared at him haughtily, as he will stare at his best friends if they touch his private concerns more nearly than he likes; a stare which said disdainfully, "I don't understand you," and thereby told the only lie to which Carruthers ever stooped in the whole course of his existence.