This unpretentious conduct of hers, so exceptional in ‘celebrities,’ who, in these days of push-and-scramble have no scruples about giving themselves what is called in modern parlance ‘any amount of side,’ rather astonished the gallant ‘Beauty Carlyon,’ as he was sometimes nicknamed by his fellow officers; and, as it is necessary to analyse his feelings thoroughly, it must also be conceded that another of his sensations on being introduced to the woman whose opinions and writings were the talk of London, was one of unmitigated admiration mingled with envy at the thought of the fortune she had made and was still making. What!—so slight a creature, whose waist he could span with his two hands, whose slender neck could be wrung as easily as that of a singing-bird, and whose head seemed too small for its glistening weight of gold hair—she, to be the possessor of a name and fame reaching throughout every part of the British Empire, and far across the wide Atlantic, and the independent mistress of such wealth as made his impecunious mouth water! Ten thousand pounds for her last book!—paid down without a murmur, even before the work was finished!—surely ‘these be excellent qualities,’ he mused within himself, afterwards falling into a still more profound reverie when he heard on unimpeachable authority that the royalties alone on her already-published works brought her in an income of over five thousand a year. Her first book had been produced when she was but seventeen, though she had feigned, when asked, to be several years older, in order to ensure attention from publishers; and she had gone on steadily rising in the scale of success till now—when she was twenty-seven, and famous with a fame surpassing that of all her men contemporaries. No doubt much money had been put by during those ten triumphal years!