“‘Full many a lover who longed to accost her, Was kept at a distance by Humphrey of Gloucester.’” The old drawing-room company Lady Lucie knew so well was not made up entirely of belles and beaux, but of better and worse, and of something mediocre to serve as a sliding scale, and weld the two extremes easily together. There was one of the uncouthly colossal Conways, and there were several of the black Finches. There was stout, squat Miss Monckton, angling for the great traveller Bruce, difficult to land, like most big fishes, that she might set him before her next literary party—as she was to angle for other fishes, food for other parties, after she was Countess of Cork. There was young Lady Charlotte North, still decidedly in the “bloom of her ugliness,” but with such a power of repartée that her wit, sparkling like a diamond, left the listener too dazzled to dwell on the plainness of the casket which held the jewel. There was Dicky of Norfolk under his strawberry leaves, coarser than any ploughman and a great deal more drunken; and there was his grace of Bridgewater, whom Lady Lucie represented as always plaguing himself with bridges and ditches. As an eccentric individual of the opposite sex Lady Lucie pointed out the great heiress of the Cavendish-Harleys, who was not Lady Lucie’s “dear duchess,” and who, while she kept up the grand simplicity of a sovereign at Bulstrode, “is yet so fond of birds and beasts and four-footed creatures, my dear,” declared Lady Lucie in a long parenthesis, “as well as of china and pictures, which to be sure is not so monstrous a taste, that I could well believe she would pledge her coronet for an oddly striped snail’s shell. Don’t you take to such vagaries, Bell, even if you had the money to waste upon them.” As a rule, the traces of a reckless pursuit of pleasure and a fierce dissipation were visible on the faces of many a high-bred man and woman there; but they were high-bred, and their power, whether expressed by langour or superciliousness, or whether it was piquant in its absolute unscrupulousness, was a very real and great power to which they were born, and which neither they nor their contemporaries ever questioned.