"The moment I get a nice, round, lump sum of money, I am going to try to hook a prince." In these words Lola is said to have announced her ambition to "the Englishman in Paris." That gossipy exile, whoever he was in this particular instance, was no friend of hers, and took care, no doubt, to render her expressions as brutally as possible. I do not doubt that he has interpreted her meaning truthfully enough. It is clear that Lola was an inordinately ambitious woman, eager to play a leading part in great affairs. Her association with Dujarier and other active politicians, the glimpses she had so often obtained of courts and thrones, stimulated this longing for power. She felt within her the capacity to rule men, and the ability to surmount great obstacles. A personal courage was hers, such as would have earned its possessor, if a man, the cross of honour. She feared not the bright face of danger, dreading only that circumstance might put the things she coveted beyond her reach. Valour alone, she knew, is seldom rewarded in a woman. It is considered by the women, and more particularly the men, who do not possess it, unwomanly. Intellect, again, she had; but its development had been checked, its faculties neglected, under the Early Victorian system of women's education. Besides, the most superficial observer could not have failed to see, that while learning in a man was accounted a qualification for responsibilities and honours, in a woman it was regarded as a not altogether enviable peculiarity--like an aquiline nose, or the gift of sword-swallowing. In the five years Lola had passed in the various capitals of Europe, it had become very plain to her that what men supremely prize in women is physical beauty. The governing sex attached no rewards (or, at any rate, the meagrest) to courage and wisdom. They asked woman only to be beautiful. Some insisted that she should also be virtuous, by which they meant she should bestow herself upon one of them exclusively. In other words, they allowed women to influence them only through the senses; and by the means they had themselves selected, the ambitious woman had no choice but to attack them.