Lady Caroline--very real, each in his or her little setting of conveniences and necessities. He knew them, and was quite indifferent to knowing them. But Lottie was altogether detached from the atmosphere in which these good people lived. And he had discovered her suddenly, making acquaintance with her in a moment--finding her out as an astronomer, all alone with the crowds of heaven, finds out a new star. This was how it made so great an impression on him. He had discovered her, standing quite alone among all the women who knew how to express and to control their emotions. She was not trained either to one or the other. The emotion, the enthusiasm in her got the upper hand of her, not she of them. A man who is only used to men and women in the secondary stages of well-sustained emotion is apt to be doubly impressed by the sight of genuine and artless passion, of whatever kind it may be. He went to town thinking not of the prima donna he had found, but of the woman who had suddenly made heaven and earth real to him, as they were to her. He posted up to London--that is, he flew thither in the express train, according to the dictates of his first impulse; but he was so entirely carried away by this second one, that he had almost forgotten his primary purpose altogether. “Ah! that is it,” he said to himself when the prima donna idea once more flashed across his mind. He did not want to lose sight of this, or to be negligent of anything that would help to make his fortune. Rollo was in the greatest need of having his fortune made. He had nothing except very expensive habits. He was obliged to spend a great deal of money in order to live, and he was obliged to live (or so, at least, he thought); and he had no money at all. Therefore a prima donna or something else was absolutely necessary. Accordingly he wound himself up with great energy, and tried to think no more of that other world which Lottie’s touch had plunged him into. In the meantime, in this world of theatres, drawing-rooms, and fashionable coteries, where people are compelled to live, whether they will or not, at an enormous cost in money, and where accordingly money must be hunted wherever scent of it can be found, it was necessary that some one, or something, should make Rollo Ridsdale’s fortune. He rushed to his impresario, and roused a faint enthusiasm momentarily in the mind of that man of great undertakings. An English prima donna, a native article, about whom the English would go wild! Yes! But would they go wild over an English prima donna? Would not the first step be, ere she was presented to the public at all, to fit her with an Italian name? Signorina Carlotta Desparda--that was what she would have to be called. The impresario shook his head. “And besides, these native articles never turn out what we are led to expect,” he said. He shook his head; he was sorry, very sorry, to disappoint his _confrère_, but----”