"And yet you are always recommending the institution! What an extraordinary obstinacy and opticism, my dear mother! I suppose you do it on the same principle as nurses recommend children nasty medicines, or as old Levett used to tender me dry biscuit _sans confiture_: ''Tisn't so nice as marmalade, I know, Master Philip, but then, dear, it's _so_ wholesome!'" "Hold your tongue, Philip," cried Lady Marabout; "I don't mean it in that sense at all, and you know I don't. If poor Lilla Montolieu is unhappy, I am sure it is all her abominable odious husband's fault; she is the sweetest creature possible. But she has a daughter, and concerning that daughter she wrote to me about a month ago, and--I never was more vexed in my life--she wants me to bring her out this season." "A victim again! My poor dear mother, you certainly deserve a Belgravian testimonial; you shall have a statue set up in Lowndes Square commemorative of the heroic endurance of a chaperone's existence, subscribed for gratefully by the girls you married well, and penitentially by the girls you couldn't marry at all." Lady Marabout laughed a little, but sighed again: "'It is fun to you, but it is death to me'----" "As the women say when we flirt with them," interpolated Carruthers. "You see, poor dear Lilla didn't know what to do. There she is, in that miserable island with the unpronounceable name that the man is governor of; shut out of all society, with nobody to marry this girl to if she had her there, except their secretary, or a West Indian planter. Of course, no mother would ruin her daughter's prospects, and take her into such an out-of-the-world corner. She knew no one so well as myself, and so to me she applied. She is the sweetest creature! I would do anything to oblige or please her, but I can't help being very sorry she has pounced upon me. And I don't the least know what this girl is like, not even whether she is presentable. I dare say she was petted and spoiled in that lazy, luxurious, tropical life when she was little, and she has been brought up the last few years in a convent in France, the very last education _I_ should choose for a girl. Fancy, if I should find her an ignorant, unformed hoyden, or a lethargic, overgrown child, or an artificial French girl, who goes to confession every day, and carries on twenty undiscoverable love affairs--fancy, if she should be ugly, or awkward, or brusque, or gauche, as ten to one she will be--fancy, if I find her utterly unpresentable!--what in the world shall I do?" "Decline her," suggested Carruthers. "I wouldn't have a horse put in my tilbury that I'd never seen, and risk driving a spavined, wall-eyed, underbred brute through the Park; and I suppose the ignominy of the début would be to you much what the ignominy of such a turn-out would be to me."