she leads a tremendously healthy life, she'll be able to take off her
muzzle and become as dangerous again as ever. It keeps her going."

"And what keeps you? You're good until the parties begin again."

"Oh she doesn't object to me now!" smiled Mrs. Meldrum. "I'm going to
take her abroad; we shall be a pretty pair." I was struck with this
energy and after a moment I enquired the reason of it. "It's to divert
her mind," my friend replied, reddening again a little, I thought. "We
shall go next week: I've only waited to see how your mother would be
before starting." I expressed to her hereupon my sense of her
extraordinary merit and also that of the inconceivability of Flora's
fancying herself still in a situation not to jump at the chance of
marrying a man like Dawling. "She says he's too ugly; she says he's too
dreary; she says in fact he's 'nobody,'" Mrs. Meldrum pursued. "She says
above all that he's not 'her own sort.' She doesn't deny that he's good,
but she finds him impossibly ridiculous. He's quite the last person she
would ever dream of." I was almost disposed on hearing this to protest
that if the girl had so little proper feeling her noble suitor had
perhaps served her right; but after a while my curiosity as to just how
her noble suitor _had_ served her got the better of that emotion, and I
asked a question or two which led my companion again to apply to him the
invidious term I have already quoted. What had happened was simply that
Flora had at the eleventh hour broken down in the attempt to put him off
with an uncandid account of her infirmity and that his lordship's
interest in her had not been proof against the discovery of the way she
had practised on him. Her dissimulation, he was obliged to perceive, had
been infernally deep. The future in short assumed a new complexion for
him when looked at through the grim glasses of a bride who, as he had
said to some one, couldn't really, when you came to find out, see her