"Valencia will do me credit: I shall see her engaged before the end of June; she will have only to choose," Lady Marabout would say to herself some twenty times in the pauses of the morning concerts, the morning parties, the bazaar committees, the toilette consultations, the audiences to religious beggars, whose name was Legion and rapacity unmeasured, the mass of unanswered correspondence whose debt lay as heavily on Lady Marabout as his chains on a convict, and were about as little likely to be knocked off, and all the other things innumerable that made her life in the season one teetotum whirl of small worries and sunshiny cares, from the moment she began her day, with her earliest cup of Mocha softened with cream from that pet dairy of hers at Fernditton, where, according to Lady Marabout, the cows were constantly _in articulo mortis_, but the milk invariably richer than anywhere else, an agricultural anomaly which presented no difficulties to _her_ reason. Like all women, she loved paradoxes, defied logic recklessly, and would clear at a bound a chasm of solecisms that would have kept Plato in difficulties about crossing it, and in doubt about the strength of his jumping-pole, all his life long. "She will do me great credit," the semi-consoled chaperone would say to herself with self-congratulatory relief; and if Lady Marabout thought now and then, "I wish she were a trifle--a trifle more--demonstrative," she instantly checked such an ungrateful and hypercritical wish, and remembered that a heart is a highly treacherous and unadvisable possession for any young lady, and a most happy omission in her anatomy, though Lady Marabout had, she would confess to herself on occasions with great self-reproach, an unworthy and lingering weakness for that contraband article, for which she scorned and scolded herself with the very worst success.