Still, it was some years before Flossie took her natural course and found in men’s admiration her own highest reward. She had seen so much of men, her brother and his friends, in her early youth, that perhaps she had a little contempt for an animal so easily tamed, so soon domesticated. Whether she had yet found the king of the forest in her Boston Paris, we must leave to the reader. He was the only lion she had. Perhaps the earlier battles and campaigns, the Italys and Marengos, were the best, after all. Yet they were so easy! Poor Lucie had been such easy prey, even to a Nantucket neophyte! And to conquer the world of New York scarce justified a Corsican lieutenant’s triumph. To trample on the patrician matron, and dazzle the jewels from Cornelia herself, was hardly harder. Then she even, in her wealthy way, had tried to serve the Lord; but found that fruitless, too. A fashionable ritual was all she had retained. Then she had led, and they had followed. Thorough ditch, thorough briar, from fad to folly. Was she not the high-priestess of that circle _debonair_, known as well in Boston or in Philadelphia as in New York, as the “married women’s set?” They pretended to be in love with one another’s husbands, and they dazzled young girls; and led their Pauls away from such Virginias as were “coming out.” But all this was not the tithe of her triumph. Some had tumbled in the ditches, or been torn and spotted in the briars. Surely the glory of these was hers also? She set the pace; and some had failed, and some had fled, and some had forged, and some had fallen through. But she had always stayed at the head, indifferent, frivolous, successful. Then was she not a patroness of art and literature? She dabbled in politics, too, and went to Washington, and corrupted simple Congressmen, and made herself a model to their wives. Mrs. Gower was at home, this afternoon; and she rose and swept her robes to the adjoining dressing-room for another gown; in this one she was visible only to her maids, her maker, and her husband. It was five or ten minutes when she came back; her pout was gone, and in its place a smile--her _pas de fascination_ as it were. She graciously beamed upon the two young girls who had come to make their dinner-call upon her, and was graciously pleased even to apologize for keeping them waiting. And their hearts were won by her at once--they were the very poor descendants of one of the very oldest pre-revolutionary families--and they talked enthusiastically about her, going home, and wondered if it could really be true what the world said about her and that Mr. Wemyss from Boston. They were stylishly dressed and poor, and waiting to be married too.