It must be acknowledged, however, that it was no uncommon occurrence for Miss Grunderson to carry the image of some tolerably good-looking and passably well-mannered young man away from any festal gathering at which she happened to find herself. The good-humoured Rosa had a habit of falling desperately in love with any eligible person whom she encountered either in public or private life, who did anything to make himself notorious, or wore his hair long enough to be entitled a Being. A long list of Beings had occupied that sentimental caravansary which Miss Grunderson called her heart. She had been in love with all the poets, from the Laureate to Mr. Tupper; with all the novelists, from the great Sir Edward to the newest fledged of Mr. Mudie’s popularities; and I fear she often fell in love with angels unawares in the shape of feminine romancers who were pleased to hide their gentle sex under masculine nomenclature. She had been in love--fathoms deep--with Lord Palmerston, Signor Mario, Sir Edwin Landseer, and Mr. Charles Mathews. She was wont to keep the three-hundred-guinea chariot waiting in Pall Mall for an hour at a stretch while she hunted Mr. Graves and his assistants for the last new portrait of her last new idol; and her room was like a good Catholic’s chapel,--hung with the engraved effigies of an army of saints. It was a very pure flame which burnt before so many shrines, and a very harmless one; and perhaps if Mr. Lowther the elder had known Rosa Grunderson’s little idiosyncrasies, he would not have felt quite so complacently triumphant in the consciousness that her round grey eyes had been fixed upon him all the evening with the fond gaze of hero-worship. Harcourt contrived to swell this triumph by artful little brotherly compliments, as the two young men walked Londonwards under the starlit summer sky, smoking their regalias, and talking as men about town do talk under those sublime stars. Sentimental Rosa was gazing at those luminous unknown worlds from the covert of the pinkest curtains in Stuccoville, and thinking about _Him_! Rosa’s last adoration was always mysteriously alluded to under cover of a personal pronoun. Her admiration for Roderick Lowther was multiplied a hundredfold by the young diplomatist’s disregard of her. Poor Rosa had been accustomed to be made the object of what, in the argotic parlance of her age, she called “a dead set,” on account of her papa’s ground-rents; and she was inclined to imagine Mr. Lowther the noblest and most disinterested of mankind because he did not commence this “dead set” immediately after being introduced to her.