As to her nature, it was quite in unison with her outward appearance--bright, sparkling, vivacious, albeit somewhat shallow, yet not without a certain veneer of surface knowledge. Eminently womanly, capricious in the extreme, witty, amusing, tireless, she had one of those attractive natures which charm everyone in a singularly magnetic fashion. Some men, eccentric in their likings, admire those semi-masculine women who have missions, support the rights of their sex on lecture platforms, emulate masculine peculiarities to the best of their abilities, and pass noisy lives in shrieking aimlessly against the tyranny of mankind. Those men who approved of such semi-masculine tendencies, certainly would not have admired the womanly characteristics of Victoria, but the connoisseur of feminine beauty, the judge of a brilliant personality, and the appreciator of a witty nature, would each see in her the realisation of an extremely difficult ideal. The Master, young and rash, was just at that delightful age when every woman appears a goddess to the uncultured fancy of youth; judge then the effect produced upon his impressionable nature by this riant vision of strongly vitalised beauty. He did not even make an attempt at resistance in any way, but prone as god Dagon on the threshold of his temple, he fell before the powerful divinity of this young girl, and she produced on him the same effect as Phryne did on her judges when she displayed the full splendour of her charms in the Areopagus under the clear blue of Athenian skies. Mactab, severe, ascetic and self-mortifying, opposed to every form of admiration of the flesh, would have blushed for the grovelling idolatory of his quondam pupil; but no doubt the sunny climate of Italy aided in a great measure this worship of Venus, and Angus Macjean, Master of Otterburn, prostrated himself in abject worship before this outward manifestation of carnal beauty. Eustace saw this, and was selfishly annoyed thereat, because he had taken a fancy to Otterburn, and thought that he (Otterburn) should agree with him (Eustace) in despising the sex feminine, which was foolish in the extreme on the part of such an acute observer of human nature; but then he was blinded by egotism, and that vice distorts every vision. Still he could not deny that physically she was wonderfully pretty, despite his feeling of animosity against her for coming between himself and his friend. Therefore he admired her greatly from an æsthetic point of view, while Victoria, with the keen instinct of a woman, scented an enemy and neither admired nor liked Eustace the cynic in the smallest degree.