Nobody who was about in London Society some thirty years ago, could
fail to know or know about the beautiful Lady CALLENDER. She was of a
good county family. She was clever and accomplished. She had married
a man rich, generous, amiable, and cultivated, who adored her.
Unfortunately they had no children, but, in every other respect, Lady
CALLENDER seemed to be very justly an object of envy and admiration
to most of the men and women of her circle. Personally I had no great
liking for her. I don't take any credit for that--far from it. The
reason may have been that her Ladyship (although I was one of her
husband's best friends, had been his school chum, and had "kept"
with him in the same set of rooms at Cambridge, where his triumphs,
physical and intellectual, are still remembered) never much cared for
me. She could dissemble her real feelings better than any woman I
ever knew, she always greeted me with a smile, she even made a parade
of taking my advice on little family difficulties, but there was an
indefinable something in her manner which convinced me that beneath
all her smiles she bore me no good-will. The fact is that, without any
design on my part, I had detected her in one or two bits of trickery,
and, in what I suppose I must call her heart of hearts, she never
forgave me. The truth is, though her guileless husband only knew it
too late, she was perhaps the trickiest and the most heartless woman
in England. If there were two roads to the attainment of any object,
the one straight, broad, smooth and short, the other round-about,
obscure, narrow and encompassed with pitfalls and beset by
difficulties, she would deliberately choose the latter for no other
reason that I could ever see except that by treading it she might be
able to deceive her friends as to her true direction. She carried
to a fine art the small intrigues, the petty jealousies, the mean
manoeuvres in the science of outwitting; the shifts, the stratagems,