After having thoroughly discussed the subject with Lady Aimwell, and having denied all intention of purposely placing herself in Lord Spoonbill’s way, Arabella Glossop retired to meditate with herself on this discovery. For though she had endeavoured to make herself agreeable to Lord Spoonbill, and though she had played off her magnificent and affected airs, it certainly had not been with any deliberate and settled design to win his lordship’s heart, but simply and purely to gratify her own vanity in playing off fine airs in the presence of a lord. There is a something in a lord so fascinating, so enchanting, no anatomist has ever yet discovered it, but it makes fools of wise men, and bends the knee in adoration, even when the understanding and the nobler powers of the mind cry “Fudge.” People make a fuss about the haughtiness and distance of nobility; but what would become of lords and right honorables, and all that sort of thing, if they were not to keep themselves most gorgeously select. They would be persecuted, baited, how-d’ye-do’d, and arm-in-armed even to suffocation, were it not that they kept the common people at an inordinate distance. If it were not for the principle of exclusiveness, lords would be in the same condition as Pidcock’s wild beasts, if open gratuitously to public curiosity. Very likely in both cases curiosity might soon be gratified, and the spectators might proclaim that there was nothing very wonderful after all. But Pidcock will never exhibit gratuitously, and lords will never associate with plebeians. Miss Glossop, as has been said above, retired to meditate on what she had heard. And though she had been in a violent passion, and had cried most bitterly in consequence of what Lady Aimwell had said to her, yet she could not help thinking that there might be some truth and some importance in what had been said. It was possible that Lord Spoonbill might have been fascinated with her very graceful manners, or have been charmed with her exquisitely beautiful musical execution, or have been delighted with the symptoms of good taste which she had displayed in her unequivocal and unqualified admiration of the magnificence and finery of Smatterton castle.