During her novel-writing days, Lady Lavinia Gathercole had rather prided herself on exhibiting just a slight spice of naughtiness in her conversation and behaviour, and she was rather tolerant of naughtiness in others; but now, since her “conversion,” as was the case with the Athenians of old, her main occupation in life was to hear (or invent) some new things. Unluckily, however, these new things were generally to the disparagement of her neighbours. Her main object was to appear young, innocent, and lamb-like. Lady Lavinia dressed like a girl, entered a room with a juvenile skip, spite of a slight lameness in one leg, and she had a way of moving her shoulders up and down, and backwards and forwards, which she fondly believed to be alluring. It certainly caused a responsive shudder to vibrate through the frames of all beholders, and it irresistibly reminded strangers of calves’ foot jelly. One of Lady Lavinia’s adulators remarking one day that she was “fawn-like,” Lord Frederic Fitzfoodles, who had apartments in the Palace, drily remarked--“Yes, like a fawn, very; but she reminds me rather of an old nanny-goat with a game leg.” Evelyn was, of course, presented to Lady Lavinia, who, with an infinite amount of undulatory movements in her shoulders, expressed herself delighted to make her acquaintance. “Really,” she cried, “I am so charmed and delighted to find my new neighbour is Young. With my poor spirits, I feel I could scarcely put up with the presence of another Old person on my staircase, paralytic, perhaps, or with a wooden leg like Admiral Grogrum, and quite--what is it the poet says?--oh! quite in the queer and mellow leaf; no, not mellow either, I think, but something like it. Do you know, Miss Manwaring,” she continued--elevating her shoulders to such an extent that Miss Strong feared she would emerge from her clothes altogether, and appear _in puris naturalibus_ in the Duchess’s drawing-room, which, if Gilray should come in, would, to say the least, be scarcely proper--“do you know that some of the dear people here are so Old that, living amongst them, I sometimes think I must be as old as Methoosalem myself!” (It is a curious question, by the way, why it is that High Church folks always say “Meth_u_sel_ah_,” and Low Church people “Meth_oo_sal_em_.”)