Apparently what really distinguished her was her energy. She traveled with her cousin, Lady Alicia Waring, a worldly, kindly dabbler in art and politics; she rushed from country-house to country-house; she worked in the slums; she sat on committees; she canvassed for parliamentary friends; she hunted, she yachted, she sang, she broke hearts, and, by all accounts, had high and resolute matrimonial ambitions. Would Eppie Gifford “get” So-and-so was a question that Gavan had heard more than once repeated, with the graceless terseness of our modern colloquialism, and it spoke much for Eppie’s popularity that it was usually asked in sympathy. This reputation for a direct and vigorous worldliness was only thrown into more pungent relief by the startling tale of her love-affair. She had fallen in love, helplessly in love, with an impecunious younger son, an officer in the Guards--a lazy, lovable, petulant nobody, the last type one would have expected her to lose her head over. He was not stupid, but he didn’t count and never would. The match would have been a reckless one, for Eppie had, practically, only enough to pay for her clothes and her traveling expenses. The handsome guardsman had not even prospects. Yet, deliberately sacrificing all her chances, she had fallen in love, been radiantly engaged, and then, from the radiance, flung into stupefying humiliation. He had thrown her over, quite openly, for an ugly little heiress from Liverpool. Poor Eppie had carried off her broken heart--and she didn’t deny that it was broken--for a year or so of travel. This had happened four years ago. She had mended as bravely as possible,--it wasn’t a deep break after all,--and on the thrilling occasion of her first meeting with the faithless lover and his bride was magnificently sweet and regal to the ugly heiress. It was surmised that the husband was as uncomfortable as he deserved to be. But this capacity for recklessness, this picture of one so dauntless, dazed and discomfited, hardly redeemed the other, the probably fundamental aspect. She had lost her head; but that didn’t prove that when she had it she would not make the best possible use of it. There was talk now--Eppie’s was the publicity of popularity--of Gavan’s old-time rival, Grainger, who had inherited an immense fortune and, unvarnished and defiantly undecorative on his lustrous background, was one of the world’s prizes. All that he had was at Eppie’s feet, and some more brilliant alternative could be the only cause for hesitation in a young woman seared by misfortune and cured forever of folly.