The dowager had been quite sincere when she spoke of her niece's beauty. There were few handsomer faces to be seen in the Lady's Mile than that which looked wistfully out of the phantom chariot. It was a pale face--pale with no muddled sickly whiteness, or bilious yellow, but that beautiful pallor which is so rare a charm,--a pensive patrician face, with a slender aquiline nose, and dark hazel eyes. People liked to see Lady Cecil in their rooms, even when she wore her plainest white muslin, and kept herself most persistently in a shadowy corner, so unmistakable were her rank and breeding. Young men who complained that she had so little to say for herself, and lamented the absence of a mysterious quality called "go" in her manners, confessed that her profile was more beautiful than the finest cameo in the Louvre, and her style unexceptionable. "If polygamy were admissible, I'd marry Lady Cecil to-morrow," remarked a gentleman of the genus Swell. "She is the woman of women to sit at the head of a fellow's table and do him credit in society; but if I were going home half-seas-over after a four-in-hand club-dinner at Richmond, I'd as soon have Lady Macbeth sitting up for me as Lord Aspendell's daughter. Not that she'd be coarse or low, like the Scotchwomen, you know--not a bit of it. She'd receive me with a stately curtsey, and freeze me to death with her classic profile. Egad! when you come to think of it, you know, old fellow, there must be a hitch somewhere in the matrimonial law. Society doesn't confine a man to one horse; society doesn't compel him to ride his park-hack across country, or harness his racing stud to his drag; and yet society limits an unhappy beast to one wife; and if he marries a nice little indulgent creature who won't look black at him when he goes home late or smokes in the dining-room, the odds are that she'll freeze his marrow by dropping her h's and talking of her par--who was something in the soap-boiling way--at an archbishop's state-dinner."