Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 2.djvu/16

 great bores by the jeunesse doree)--no accomplishment except horsemanship, with a slight knack at billiards, and the capacity to take three whiffs from a Spanish cigarette. That last was adorable--four offers had been advanced to her hand on that merit alone.--(N.B. Young ladies do themselves no good with the jeunesse doree, which, in our time, is a lover that rather 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 those pretty hands resting on one's arm-chair, or that sunny face shining into one's study windows, one might be a very happy old fool--and that is the most one can expect!"

COLONEL MORLEY (checking an anxious groan).--"I am afraid, my poor friend, you are far gone already. No