Lady Marabout _had_ a heart herself; to it she had had to date the greatest worries, troubles, imprudences, and vexations of her life; she had had to thank it for nothing, and to dislike it for much; it had made her grieve most absurdly for other people's griefs; it had given her a hundred unphilosophical pangs at philosophic ingratitude from people who wanted her no longer; it had teased, worried, and plagued her all her life long, had often interfered in the most meddling and inconvenient manner between her and her reason, her comfort and her prudence; and yet she had a weakness for the same detrimental organ in other people--a weakness of which she could no more have cured herself than of her belief in the detection-defying powers of liquid rouge, the potentiality of a Liliputian night-bolt against an army of burglars, the miraculous properties of sal volatile, the efficacy of sermons, and such-like articles of faith common to feminine orthodoxy. A weakness of which she never felt more ignominiously convicted and more secretly ashamed than in the presence of Miss Valletort, that young lady having a lofty and magnificent disdain for all such follies, quite unattainable to ordinary mortals, which oppressed Lady Marabout with a humiliating sense of inferiority to her niece of eighteen summers. "So admirably educated! so admirably brought up!" she would say to herself over and over again, and if heretic suggestions that the stiffest trained flowers are not always the best, that the upright and spotless arum-lily isn't so fragrant as the careless, brilliant, tangled clematis; that rose-boughs, tossing free in sunshine and liberty, beat hollow the most carefully-pruned standard that ever won a medal at Regent's Park, with such-like allegories, arising from contemplation of her conservatory or her balcony flowers, _would_ present themselves, Lady Marabout repressed them dutifully, and gratefully thought how many pounds' weight lighter became the weary burden of a chaperone's responsibilities when the onerous charge had been educated "on the best system." "Goodwood's attentions _are_ serious, Philip, say what you like," said the Countess to her son, as determinedly as a theologian states his pet points with wool in his ears, that he may not hear any Satan-inspired, rational, and mathematical disproval of them, with which you may rashly seek to soil his tympana and smash his arguments--"Goodwood's attentions _are_ serious, Philip, say what you like," said her ladyship, at a morning party at Kew, eating her Neapolitan ice, complacently glancing at the "most eligible alliance of the season," who was throwing the balls at lawn-billiards, and talking between whiles to the Hon. Val with praiseworthy and promising animation.