It is comparatively easy to read a character from a face. This is always a scientific possibility. To fit the face to a given character is obviously the reverse. And those who knew the worst of Lady Caroline Sellwood, before making her acquaintance, received, on that occasion, something like a shock. They had nourished visions of a tall and stately figure with a hook-nose and an exquisitely supercilious smile; whereas her Ladyship was decidedly short, and extremely stout, with as plebeian a snub-nose and as broad a grin as any in her own back-kitchen. Instead of the traditionally frigid leader of society, she was a warm-hearted woman where her own interests were not concerned; where they were, she was just what expedience made her, and her heart then took its temperature from her head, like the excellent servant it had always been. A case very much in point is that of her relations with Claude Lafont, whom, however, Lady Caroline had now her own reasons for fearing no more. As for the Duke of St. Osmund's, her heart had been a perfect oven to him from the first. Nor did she make any pretence about the matter--it was this that so repelled Olivia. But the very falsity of the woman was frank to the verge of a virtue; and the honest dishonesty of her front hair (which was of the same shade as Olivia's, only much more elaborately curled) was as bluntly emblematic as a pirate's flag. Lady Caroline Sellwood was honestly dishonest to the last ounce of her two hundredweight of avoirdupois. This was the kind of thing she thought nothing of doing. She had been engaged for months upon an egregious smoking-cap for Claude Lafont. That is to say she had from time to time put in a few golden stitches, in front of Claude, which her maid had been obliged to pick out and put in again behind the scenes. Claude, at any rate, had always understood that the cap was for him--until one evening here in the conservatory, when he saw Lady Caroline coolly trying it on the Duke. "It never did fit you, Claude," she explained serenely. "It was always too small, and I must make you another. Only see how it fits the dear Duke!" The dear Duke was made the recipient of many another mark of unblushing favour. He could do no wrong. His every solecism of act or word, and they still cropped up at times, was simply "sweet" in the eyes of Lady Caroline Sellwood, and his name was seldom on her lips without that epithet. Moreover, she would speak her mind to him on every conceivable topic, and this with a freedom often embarrassing for Jack; as, for example, on the first Sunday after church. "I simply don't know how Francis dared!" Lady Caroline exclaimed, as she took Jack's arm on the sunlit terrace. "Twenty-one minutes by my watch--and such drivel! It didn't seem so to you? Ah, you're so sweet! But twenty-one minutes was an outrage, and I shall tell the little idiot exactly what I think of him."