So Flo was obliged to be satisfied, and was fain to go into society under the wing of benevolent matrons who had no daughters of their own to be crushed by Miss Crawford's beauty. Flo had her maid and her carriage and was quite a little woman of fashion; while the painter lived his own life opening his doors every Sunday evening to all who cared to visit him, and generally hiding himself in some snug little corner of his spacious drawing-rooms amongst the friends of his soul, while fashionable visitors who had been received with perfect _aplomb_ by Florence, prowled about in search of him, and stared at the wrong man through gold-rimmed eyeglasses, or pronounced adverse criticisms upon his own pictures under his very nose. Of course Florence Crawford was perfectly aware that her father's _protégé_, the landscape painter, was desperately in love with her. We live in a fast-going century, and though Flo was only eighteen, she was fully versed in the diagnostics of a hopeless passion of which she was the object. She knew poor Philip's weakness, and laughed undisguisedly at his folly. She was a very dashing young person, and she declared herself to be an utterly heartless young person whenever she became expansive and confidential. Whether the heartlessness were real or affected was an enigma which no one had yet been able to solve. Whatever were the follies of the age, Flo went with them at full gallop. She talked slang, and affected a masculine contempt for all feminine pursuits, had been heard to ask what bodkins were meant for, and whether shirt-buttons were fastened on their foundations with glue. She had a tiny, tiny morocco volume, lined with satin, and emblazoned with gold, and obnoxious with patchouli--a volume that was called a betting-book, and which had about the same relation to the greasy volumes kept by the bookmen who gather on the waste ground in Victoria Road, or meet one another furtively at the corner of Farringdon Street, as a rosebud has to a red cabbage. Dozens of Jouvin's or Dent's six-and-a-quarter gloves were the principal entries in this mystic volume; but Flo had been known to obtain an actual tip from some aristocratic member of the Jockey Club, by whose friendly agency real money had been wagered and won. She was very fast, and had once been seen under the marble colonnade at the Fountains puffing daintily at a coquettish little cigarette. But it is only fair to add that the daring exploit resulted in deadly pallor and unpleasant faintness, and that the experiment was not repeated. She had her horse, and her own groom,--a steady old fellow who helped in the garden, and of whose boots and costume poor Flo was inclined to be rather ashamed when she met her stylish friends in the Row.