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." "Of course I am right! Adam was tranquil and unworried till fate sent him a wife, and he was typical of the destinies of his descendants. Those who are wise, take warning; those who are not, neglect it and repent. Lady Hautton et C^{ie} are very fond of twisting scriptural obscurities into 'types.' _There's_ a type plain as day, and salutary to mankind, if detrimental to women!"