He was coming for that purpose, and, though Lady Marabout had so scornfully and sincerely repudiated her son's counsel relative to making play with Goodwood, blandly ignorant of her own weaknesses like a good many other people, Lady Marabout was not above a glow of chaperone gratification when she saw the glance of admiration which the Pet Eligible of the season bestowed on Valencia Valletort. Goodwood was a good-looking fellow--a clever fellow--though possibly he shone best alone at a mess luncheon, in a chat driving to Hornsey Wood, round the fire in a smoking-room, on a yacht deck, or anywhere where ladies of the titled world were not encountered, he having become afraid of them by dint of much persecution, as any October partridge of a setter's nose. He was passably good-looking, ordinarily clever, a very good fellow as I say, and--he was elder son of his Grace of Doncaster, which fact would have made him the desired of every unit of the _beau sexe_, had he been hideous as the Veiled Prophet or Brutal Gilles de Rayes. The Beauty often loves the Beast in our day, as in the days of fairy lore. We see that beloved story of our petticoat days not seldom acted out, and when there is no possibility of personal transmogrification and amelioration for the Beast moreover; only--the Beauty has always had whispered in her little ear the title she will win, and the revenues she will gain, and the cloth of gold she will wear, if she caresses Bruin the enamoured, swears his ugly head is god-like, and vows fidelity unswerving! Goodwood was no uncouth Bruin, and he had strawberry-leaves in his gift; none of your lacquered, or ormolu, or silver-gilt coronets, such as are cast about nowadays with a liberality that reminds one of flinging a handful of halfpence from a balcony, where the nimblest beggar is first to get the prize; but of the purest and best gold; and Goodwood had been tried for accordingly by every woman he came across for the last dozen years. Women of every style and every order had primed all their rifles, and had their shot at him, and done their best to make a centre and score themselves as winner: belles and bas bleus, bewitching widows and budding débutantes, fast young ladies who tried to capture him in the hunting-field by clearing a bullfinch; saintly young ladies, who illuminated missals, and hinted they would like to take his conversion in hand; brilliant women, who talked at him all through a long rainy day, when Perthshire was flooded, and the black-fowl unattainable; showy women, who _posê'd_ for him whole evenings in their opera-boxes, whole mornings in their boudoir--all styles and orders had set at him, till he had sometimes sworn in his haste that all women were man-traps, and that he wished to Heaven he were a younger son in the Foreign Office, or a poor devil in the Line, or anything, rather than what he was; the Pet Eligible of his day.