talk thus to a demoiselle who has all those young fellows at her feet."

"Oh," said Lady Selina, overhearing, and with a half laugh, "Honoria
thinks much as you do: she finds the young men so insipid; all like one
another,--the same set phrases."

"The same stereotyped ideas," added Honoria, moving away with a gesture
of calm disdain.

"A very superior mind hers," whispered the Colonel to Carr Vipont.
"She'll never marry a fool."

Guy Darrell was very pleasant at "the small family dinnerparty." Carr
was always popular in his manners; the true old House of Commons manner,
which was very like that of a gentleman-like public school. Lady Selina,
as has been said before, in her own family circle was natural and genial.
Young Carr, there, without his wife, more pretentious than his father,--
being a Lord of the Admiralty,--felt a certain awe of Darrell, and spoke
little, which was much to his own credit and to the general conviviality.
The other members of the symposium, besides Lady Selina, Honoria, and a
younger sister, were but Darrell, Lionel, and Lady Selina's two cousins;
elderly peers,--one with the garter, the other in the Cabinet,--jovial
men who had been wild fellows once in the same mess-room, and still joked
at each other whenever they met as they met now. Lionel, who remembered
Vance's description of Lady Selina, and who had since heard her spoken of
in society as a female despot who carried to perfection the arts by which
despots flourish, with majesty to impose, and caresses to deceive--an
Aurungzebe in petticoats--was sadly at a loss to reconcile such
portraiture with the good-humoured, motherly woman who talked to him of
her home, her husband, her children, with open fondness and becoming