bring herself to abandon the plunder on which she had laid her hand--a
grand idea of surrendering herself and all her possessions to a great
passion. For Florian Eustace she had never cared. She had sat down by his
side, and looked into his handsome face, and read poetry to him, because
of his wealth, and because it had been indispensable to her to settle
herself well. And he had been all very well--a generous, open-hearted,
chivalrous, irascible, but rather heavy-minded gentleman; but she had
never been in love with him. Now she desired to be so in love that she
could surrender everything to her love. There was as yet nothing of such
love in her bosom. She had seen no one who had so touched her. But she was
alive to the romance of the thing, and was in love with the idea of being
in love. "Ah," she would say to herself in her moments of solitude, "if I
had a Corsair of my own, how I would sit on watch for my lover's boat by
the sea-shore!" And she believed it of herself that she could do so.

But it would also be very nice to be a peeress--so that she might, without
any doubt, be one of the great ladies of London. As a baronet's widow with
a large income, she was already almost a great lady; but she was quite
alive to a suspicion that she was not altogether strong in her position.
The bishop's people and the dean's people did not quite trust her. The
Camperdowns and Garnetts utterly distrusted her. The Mopuses and Benjamins
were more familiar than they would be with a really great lady. She was
sharp enough to understand all this. Should it be Lord Fawn or should it
be a Corsair? The worst of Lord Fawn was the undoubted fact that he was
not himself a great man. He could, no doubt, make his wife a peeress; but
he was poor, encumbered with a host of sisters, dull as a blue-book, and
possessed of little beyond his peerage to recommend him. If she could only
find a peer, unmarried, with a dash of the Corsair about him! In the
meantime what was she to do about the jewels?