"The women are eternally asking me who she is, I don't care a hang _who_, but she's the prettiest thing in London," said Fulke Nugent, which was the warmest praise that any living man about town remembered to have heard fall from his lips, which limited themselves religiously to one legitimate laudation, which is a superlative nowadays, though Mr. Lindley Murray, if alive, wouldn't, perhaps, receive or recognize it as such: "Not bad-looking." "It isn't _who_ a woman is, it's _what_ she is, that's the question, I take it," said Goodwood, as he left the Guards' box to visit the Marabout. "By George!" laughed Nugent to Carruthers, "Goodey must be serious, eh, Phil? He don't care a button for little Bibi; he don't care even for Zerlina. When the ballet begins, I verily believe he's thinking less of the women before him than of the woman who has left the house; and if a fellow can give more ominous signs of being 'serious,' as the women phrase it, I don't know 'em, do you?" "I don't know much about that sort of thing at all!" muttered Carruthers, as he went out to follow Goodwood to the Marabout box. That is an old, old story, that of the fair Emily stirring feud between Palamon and Arcite. It has been acted out many a time since Beaumont and Fletcher lived and wrote their twin-thoughts and won their twin laurels; but the bars that shut the kinsmen in their prison-walls, the ivy-leaves that filled in the rents of their prison-stones, were not more entirely and blissfully innocent of the feud going on within, and the battle foaming near them, than the calm, complacent soul of Lady Marabout was of the rivalry going on close beside her for the sake of little Montolieu. She certainly thought Philip made himself specially brilliant and agreeable that night; but then that was nothing new, he was famous for talking well, and liked his mother enough not seldom to shower out for her some of his very best things; certainly she thought Goodwood did not shine by the contrast, and looked, to use an undignified word, rather cross than otherwise; but then nobody _did_ shine beside Philip, and she knew a reason that made Goodwood pardonably cross at the undesired presence of his oldest and dearest chum. Even _she_ almost wished Philip away. If the presence of her idolized son could have been unwelcome to her at any time, it was so that night. "It isn't like Philip to monopolize her so, he who has so much tact usually, and cares nothing for girls himself," thought Lady Marabout; "he must do it for mischief, and yet _that_ isn't like him at all; it's very tiresome, at any rate." And with that skilful diplomacy in such matters, on which, if it was sometimes overthrown, Lady Marabout not unjustly plumed herself, she dexterously entangled Carruthers in conversation, and during the crash of one of the choruses whispered, as he bent forward to pick up her fan, which she had let drop,