She had been a woman of average intelligence when she married him,--commonplace, certainly, but good-natured and willing to make the best of everything; needless to say that the illusions of youth vanished with the first years of wedded life (as they are apt to do), and she had gradually sunk into a flabby condition of resigned nonentity, seeing there was nothing else left for her. The dull, tame tenor of her days had once been interrupted by the birth of her only child Diana, who as long as she was small and young, and while she was being educated under the usual system of governesses and schools, was an object of delight, affection, amusement and interest, and who, when she grew up and “came out” at eighteen as a graceful, pretty girl of the freshest type of English beauty, gave her mother something to love and to live for,--but alas!--Diana had proved the bitterest of all her disappointments. The “coming-out” business, the balls, the race-meetings and other matrimonial traps had been set in vain;--the training, the music, the dancing, the “toilettes”--had failed to attract,--and Diana had not married. She had fallen in love, as most girls do before they know much about men,--and she had engaged herself to an officer with “expectations” for whom, with a romantic devotion as out of date as the poems of Chaucer, she had waited for seven long years in a resigned condition of alarming constancy,--and then, when his “expectations” were realised, he had promptly thrown her over for a fairer and younger partner. By that time Diana was what is called “getting on.” All this had tried the temper of Mrs. James Polydore May considerably--and she took refuge from her many vexations in the pleasures of the table and the consolations of sleep. The result of this mode of procedure was that she became corpulent and unwieldy,--her original self was swallowed up in a sort of featherbed of adipose tissue, from which she peered out on the world with protruding, lustreless eyes, the tip of her small nose seeming to protest feebly against the injustice of being well-nigh walled from sight between the massive flabby cheeks on either side of its never classic and distinctly parsimonious proportions. With oversleep and over-eating she had matured into a stupid and somewhat obstinate woman, with a habit of saying unmeaningly nice or nasty things:--she would “gush” affectionately to all and sundry,--to the maid who fastened her shoes as ardently as to a friend of many years standing,--yet she would mock her own guests behind their backs, or unkindly criticise the physical and mental defects of the very man or woman she had flattered obsequiously five minutes before. So that she was not exactly a “safe” acquaintance,--you never knew where to have her. But,--as is often the case with these placidly smiling, obese ladies,--everyone seemed to be in a conspiracy to call her “sweet,” and “dear” and “kind,” whereas in very truth she was one of the most selfish souls extant.