‘When Lady Riddlesworth joins the conversation it is like a stoppage in the streets. I invented a piece of intelligence to clear the way, as you would call out Fire! or The queen is coming! There used to be things called _vers de société_, which were not poetry; and I do not see why there should not be social illusions which are not fibs.’ ‘I entirely agree with you,’ said Lord Milford; ‘and I move that we practise them on a large scale.’ ‘Like the verses, they might make life more light,’ said Lady Theresa. ‘We are surrounded by illusions,’ said Lord Eugene, in a melancholy tone. ‘And shams of all descriptions,’ said Edith; ‘the greatest, a man who pretends he has a broken heart when all the time he is full of fun.’ ‘There are a great many men who have broken hearts,’ said Lord Beaumanoir, smiling sorrowfully. ‘Cracked heads are much commoner,’ said Edith, ‘you may rely upon it. The only man I really know with a broken heart is Lord Fitz-Booby. I do think that paying Mount-Dullard’s debts has broken his heart. He takes on so; ‘tis piteous. “My dear Mrs. Coningsby,” he said to me last night, “only think what that young man might have been; he might have been a lord of the treasury in ‘35; why, if he had had nothing more in ‘41, why, there’s a loss of between four and five thousand pounds; but with my claims--Sir Robert, having thrown the father over, was bound on his own principle to provide for the son--he might have got something better; and now he comes to me with his debts, and his reason for paying his debts, too, Mrs. Coningsby, because he is going to be married; to be married to a woman who has not a shilling. Why, if he had been in office, and only got 1,500L. a year, and married a woman with only another 1,500L., he would have had 3,000L. a year, Mrs. Coningsby; and now he has nothing of his own except some debts, which he wants me to pay, and settle 3,000L. a year on him besides.”’ They all laughed. ‘Ah!’ said Mrs. Coningsby, with a resemblance which made all start, ‘you should have heard it with the Fitz-Booby voice.’ The character of a woman rapidly develops after marriage, and sometimes seems to change, when in fact it is only complete. Hitherto we have known Edith only in her girlhood, bred up in a life of great simplicity, and under the influence of a sweet fancy, or an absorbing passion. Coningsby had been a hero to her before they met, the hero of nursery hours and nursery tales. Experience had not disturbed those dreams. From the moment they encountered each other at Millbank, he assumed that place in her heart which he had long occupied in her imagination; and, after their second meeting at Paris, her existence was merged in love. All the crosses and vexations of their early affection only rendered this state of being on her part more profound and engrossing.