woman, is what you should do, or else you are likely to find yourself
planted unawares in a high wind, your hat blown off, and your coat-tails
anywhere; in other words, you will stand ridiculous in your bewilderment;
and General Ople ever footed with the utmost caution to avoid that
quagmire of the ridiculous. The extremer quags he had hitherto escaped;
the smaller, into which he fell in his agile evasions of the big, he had
hitherto been blest in finding none to notice.

He requested her ladyship's permission to present his daughter. Lady
Camper sent in her card.

Elizabeth Ople beheld a tall, handsomely-mannered lady, with good
features and penetrating dark eyes, an easy carriage of her person and
an agreeable voice, but (the vision of her age flashed out under the
compelling eyes of youth) fifty if a day. The rich colouring confessed
to it. But she was very pleasing, and Elizabeth's perception dwelt on it
only because her father's manly chivalry had defended the lady against
one year more than forty.

The richness of the colouring, Elizabeth feared, was artificial, and it
caused her ingenuous young blood a shudder. For we are so devoted to
nature when the dame is flattering us with her gifts, that we loathe the
substitute omitting to think how much less it is an imposition than a
form of practical adoration of the genuine.

Our young detective, however, concealed her emotion of childish horror.

Lady Camper remarked of her, 'She seems honest, and that is the most we
can hope of girls.'