"Philip, you are abominable! don't be so wicked!" cried Lady Marabout, enjoying it all the more because she was a little shocked at it, as your best women will on occasion; human nature is human nature everywhere, and the female heart gives pleasurable little pulses at the sight of forbidden fruits now, as in the days of Eve. "Who's that Miss Montolieu with your mother this year, Phil?" dozens of men asked Carruthers, that season, across the mess-table, in the smoking-room of the Guards, in the Ride or the Ring, in the doorways of ball-rooms, or anywhere where such-like questions are asked and new pretty women discussed. "What is it in her that takes so astonishingly?" wondered Lady Marabout, who is, like most women, orthodox on all points, loving things by rule, worrying if they go out of the customary routine, and was, therefore, quite incapable of reconciling herself to so revolutionary a fact as a young lady being admired who was not a beauty, and sought while she was detrimental in every way. It was "out of the general rule," and your orthodox people hate anything "out of the general run," as they hate their prosperous friends: the force of hatred can no further go! Flora Montolieu's crime in Belgravia was much akin to the Bonapartes' crimes to the Bourbons. Thrones must be filled legitimately, if not worthily, in the eyes of the orthodox people, and this Petit Caporal of Lady Marabout's had no business to reign where the Hereditary Princesses and all the other noble lines failed to sway the sceptre. Lady Marabout, belonging to the noble lines herself, agreed in her heart with them, and felt a little bit guilty to have introduced this democratic and unwelcome element in society. Flora Montolieu "took," as people say of bubble companies, meaning that they will pleasantly ruin a million or two: or of new fashions, meaning that they will become general with the many and, _sequitur_, unwearable with the few. She had the brilliance and grace of one of her own tropical flowers, with something piquante and attractive about her that one had to leave nameless, but that was all the more charming for that very fact perhaps; full of life and animation, but soft as a gazelle, as her chaperone averred; not characterless, as Lady Marabout fondly desired (on the same principle, I suppose, as a timid whip likes a horse as spiritless as a riding-school hack), but gifted with plenty of very marked character, so much, indeed, that it rather puzzled her _camériste_.