smokes than "sighs, like furnace," by advertising their horror of
cigars.) You would suppose that Flora Vyvyan must be coarse-vulgar
perhaps; not at all; she was pignaute--original; and did the oddest
things with the air and look of the highest breeding. Fairies cannot be
vulgar, no matter what they do; they may take the strangest liberties--
pinch the maids--turn the house topsy-turvy; but they are ever the
darlings of grace and poetry. Flora Vyvyan was a fairy. Not peculiarly
intellectual herself, she had a veneration for intellect; those fast
young men were the last persons likely to fascinate that fast young lady.
Women are so perverse; they always prefer the very people you would least
suspect--the antithesis to themselves. Yet is it possible that Flora
Vyvyan can have carried her crotchets to so extravagant a degree as to
have designed the conquest of Guy Darrell--ten years older than her own
father? She, too, an heiress--certainly not mercenary; she who had
already refused better worldly matches than Darrell himself was--young
men, handsome men, with coronets on the margin of their note-paper and
the panels of their broughams! The idea seemed preposterous;
nevertheless, Alban Morley, a shrewd observer, conceived that idea, and
trembled for his friend.

At last the young lady and her satellites shot off, and the Colonel said
cautiously, "Miss Vyvyan is--alarming."

DARRELL.--"Alarming! the epithet requires construing."

COLONEL MORLEY.--"The sort of girl who might make a man of our years
really and literally an old fool!"

DARRELL.--"Old fool such a man must be if girls of any sort are permitted
to make him a greater fool than he was before. But I think that, with