"My dear mother, like all disputants, when beaten in argument and driven into a corner, you resort to vituperation of your opponent!" laughed Carruthers, as he left her and lounged away to pick up the stick with which pretty Flora Elmers had just knocked the pipe out of Aunt Sally's head on to the velvet lawn of Lady George Frangipane's dower-house, leaving his mother by no means tranquillized by his suggestions. "Dear me!" thought Lady Marabout, uneasily, as she conversed with the Dowager-Countess of Patchouli on the respective beauties of two new pelargonium seedlings, the Leucadia and the Beatrice, for which her gardener had won prizes the day before at the Regent's Park Show--"dear me! why is there invariably this sort of cross-purposes in everything? It will be so grievous to lose Goodwood (and he _is_ decidedly struck with her; when he bought that rosebud yesterday of her at the bazaar, and put it in the breast of his waistcoat, I heard what he said, and it was no nonsense, no mere flirting complaisance either)--it would be so grievous to lose him; and yet if Valencia really care for Cardonnel--and sometimes I almost fancy she does--I shouldn't know which way to advise. I thought it would be odd if a season could pass quietly without my having some worry of this sort! With fifty men always about Valencia, as they are, how _can_ I be responsible for any mischief that may happen, though, to hear Philip talk, one would really imagine it was _my_ fault that they lost their heads, as he calls it! As if a forty-horse steam-power could stop a man when he's once off down the incline into love! The more you try to pull him back the more impetus you give him to go headlong down. I wish Goodwood would propose, and we could settle the affair definitively. It is singular, but she has had no offers hardly with all her beauty. It is very singular, in _my_ first season I had almost as many as I had names on my tablets at Almack's. But men don't marry now, they say. Perhaps 'tisn't to be wondered at, though I wouldn't allow it to Philip. Poor things! they lose a very great many pleasant things by it, and get nothing, I'm sure, nine times out of ten, except increased expenses and unwelcome worries. I don't think I would have married if I'd been a man, though I'd never admit it, of course, to one of them. There are plenty of women who know too much of their own sex ever to wonder that a man doesn't marry, though of course we don't say so; 'twouldn't be to our interest. Sculptors might as well preach iconoclasm, or wine-merchants tee-totalism, as women misoganism, however little in our hearts we may marvel at it. Oh, my dear Lady Patchouli! you praise the Leucadia too kindly--you do indeed--but if you really think so much of it, let me send you some slips. I shall be most happy, and Fenton will be only too proud; it is his favorite seedling."