Thus the duchy's drawing-rooms. In the back parlours of the little country-town shops, where an aristocracy as rigid in its own respectable--and respectful--way, held its courts of justice, Loveday's story was referred to with a slight difference. She had become a "young besom," and her crime was what you might have expected from the bye-blow of an ear-ringed foreigner, who bowed down to idols instead of the laws of God and the British Constitution. In her own little seaport and the farms of the countryside, Loveday descended lower still--she became a "faggot." Thus from one born to wield a broom we see how she descended, with the declination in scale of the chatterboxes, to the broom itself, and from that to the rough material for it. Which things are a parable, could one but fit the moral to them as neatly as did everyone who discussed Loveday, in whatever terms, fit the due warning on to her tale. And this moral, for all who ran, but more particularly for those who danced, to read, was as follows:-- It all came of wanting things above your station. "How simply does your sex dispose of the problems of life, ma'am," replied Mr. Constantine to Miss Flora Le Pettit, the heiress of Ignores Manor, when she supplied him with this moral as an epitaph oh the affair. Miss Le Pettit smiled on him amiably, but arched her already springing brows as well, for though everyone knew Mr. Constantine was reputed clever, there were the gravest doubts about his orthodoxy. "Problems of life, Mr. Constantine?" she demanded. "Surely over-fine words to apply to the crazy acts of a village girl deranged in her intellects." She would have added: "And a nameless one at that," if she had not remembered (what, in truth, she was never in danger of forgetting) that she was a lady talking to a gentleman. "A village girl is as capable of passion as you or I," replied he, and had he not remembered (what he was somewhat apt to forget) that he was a gentleman talking to a lady, he would have added: "And a great deal more so than you." Miss Le Pettit, who considered that he _had_ forgotten it, gave the little movement known as "bridling," which reared her ringletted head a trifle higher on her white shoulders, then decided to front the obnoxious word bravely as a woman of the world. She had met with it chiefly in books where it was used solely to denote anger. There had been, for instance, the tale of "Henry: or, the Fatal Effect of Passion." ... Henry had slain a school-fellow in his rage, and had been duly hanged; yet something told Miss Le Pettit that was not how Mr. Constantine was using the word.... She rose to it splendidly. "Passion ... and pray where do you find such a thing in this story of the vanity of a child of fifteen?"