Led by this young lady, who was blessed with an energetic temperament and imperturbable good humour, Mr. Grunderson found himself, always more or less independently of his own agency, going through the complete formula of fashionable life according to his daughter Rosa’s notion of that formula; which notion was extremely variable, and took its colour from the last acquaintance to whom the lively heiress was pleased to attach herself. The very last just now happened to be Maude Tredethlyn, about whom Rosa was ready to go off into raptures at any moment, and whom she always spoke of as “a dear,” “a love,” or “a darling.” But there was a warm womanly heart beating under Rosa’s fine dresses, and her raptures had more meaning in them than the raptures of enthusiastic young ladies are apt to have. She attached herself so effectually to Maude that Mrs. Tredethlyn was fain to forget, or at any rate to forgive, the occasional lapses in her grammar, the unpleasant warmth of her fat little hands, which always came flopping down on the hands of her companion when she was enthusiastic, and the shadow of vulgarity which is so apt to accompany the sunshine of low-born liveliness. Harcourt Lowther took an early opportunity to inform his elder brother that the young lady in pink areophane was an heiress, and an heiress well worthy the cultivation of any enterprising young diplomatist. Roderick was not slow to take the hint, but he was a great deal too much of a diplomatist to attempt any obvious angling for this rich prize. He exerted all his powers of fascination in order to make himself agreeable to Mrs. Tredethlyn, and he did not address so much as one syllable of the most commonplace civility to the market-gardener’s daughter; the consequence of which little manœuvre was, that as Rosa was sitting next to Maude all the evening, she listened open-mouthed to every word he uttered, and when she departed in her papa’s three-hundred-guinea chariot--the market-gardener had insisted on possessing the traditional lemon-coloured chariot with hammer-cloth, and powdered retainers, which he had beheld and admired in his boyhood--she carried Roderick Lowther’s image away with her.