THE WHITE RIBAND

OR

A YOUNG FEMALE'S FOLLY


Prologue


That was how they spoke of her story in the duchy's drawing-rooms;
for what had Loveday been, at the most charitable count, but a young
female--less humanly speaking, even a young person? And what was the
spring of her mad crimes but folly, mere weak, feminine folly? Even
an improper motive--one of those over-powering passions one reads
about rather surreptitiously in the delightful works of that dear,
naughty, departed Lord Byron--would have been somehow more ...
more ... satisfactory. One could only whisper such a sentiment, but
it stirred in many a feminine breast when Loveday's story set the
ripples of reprobation circling some twenty miles, till the incomparably
bigger pebble of the Prince of Wales' nuptials made correspondingly
greater waves, even though they took a month or so to spread all its
fascinating details so far from the Metropolis. What, after all, as a
topic of conversation, was Loveday's ill-gotten gaud compared with the
thrill of the new Alexandra jacket with its pegtop sleeves? One should
hold a right proportion in all things.

Thus the duchy's drawing-rooms. In the back parlours of the little
country-town shops, where an aristocracy as rigid in its own