Am so glad to hear Valmond has turned up at Chevenix Castle. You have it all your own way now. I hear it was the Doraines who gave the Vane-Corduroys their first start last year. It seems the Doraines were in awfully low water and at their wit's ends what to do. Mrs. Chevington says they had almost decided to go to Boulogne when Lord Doraine met Sir Dennis O'Desmond and advised them to go to Bayswater, for he said that three months there had pulled him straight. It seems you take a house in a terrace, go to the nearest church, and buy groceries and meat in the neighbourhood, and everybody calls. That's the way the Doraines found the Vane-Corduroys. Mrs. Vane-Corduroy was presented by Lady Doraine; it cost an enormous sum, and Lord Doraine told Algy Chevington he was making quite a tidy income in Bayswater terraces. I should think Lord de Manton might follow his example, but I suppose he is too old for Society. Lady de Manton has gone up to London to him. She is not going as stewardess to Jamaica: Lord de Manton has got "put on" to something, it's to do with a Government Contract; and is very secret and mysterious. They have taken a maisonette in Chelsea, and I am so glad for poor Lady de Manton, for they treated her quite like one of themselves at her boarding-house at Weston-super-mare. {_Society Beauties_} Your account of the ball was amusing; Octavia looked after you, as I knew she would, and managed to play Valmond very cleverly for you. She wrote me herself to say he was so firmly hooked that he would be landed now without any difficulty. I can't help smiling at your being surprised to find that the Society beauties that the papers rave about are _quite, quite old_, and not really beautiful at all. Did you think that "age could not wither them, nor custom stale their infinite variety"? Nor was I at all surprised to hear that they flirted with boys; they always do at their age; it's their chief amusement to pick out the nicest and handsomest boys and make men of the world of them. Dolly Tenderdown may only look fifteen and behave "grown-up," but, depend on it, he knows as much of life as Lord Valmond. Those pretty youngsters have a very quick intelligence, and between the mess-room and the ball-room there is not much that they have not learnt. Immaculate to look at, my experience of them is that they are anything but clean. Tom Carterville belonged to another genus. The Dolly Tenderdown kind only grows when you fertilise the soil, but your Tom Cartervilles grow wild in any soil and in all seasons. {_Boys in Society_} I wish boys could be kept out of Society till they are really grown-up, they are such a nuisance. They never know how to preserve their equilibrium, for they are either intense, and make martyrs of themselves like Stefano and Tom, or horrid, fast, impertinent creatures like Dolly. And there are so many boys in Society now-a-days.