I
drive Ormont? Because I'm too fond of him. There you have the secret of
the subjection of women: they can hold their own, and a bit more, when
they've no enemy beating inside."

"Hearts!--ah, well, it's possible. I don't say no; I've not discovered
them," Lord Adderwood observed.

They are rarely discovered in the haunts he frequented.

Her allusion to Mrs. Lawrence Finchley rapped him smartly, and she
admired his impassiveness under the stroke. Such a spectacle was one of
her pleasures.

Lady Charlotte mentioned incidentally her want of a tutor for her
grandson Leo during the winter holidays. He suggested an application to
the clergyman of her parish. She was at feud with the Rev. Stephen
Hampton-Evey, and would not take, she said, a man to be a bootblack in
her backyard or a woman a scullery-wench in her kitchen upon his
recommendation. She described the person of Mr. Hampton-Evey, his manner
of speech, general opinions, professional doctrines; rolled him into a
ball and bowled him, with a shrug for lamentation, over the decay of the
good old order of manly English Protestant clergymen, who drank their
port, bothered nobody about belief, abstained from preaching their
sermon, if requested; were capital fellows in the hunting-field, too; for
if they came, they had the spur to hunt in the devil's despite. Now we
are going to have a kind of bitter, clawed, forked female, in vestments
over breeches. "How do you like that bundling of the sexes?"

Lord Adderwood liked the lines of division to be strictly and invitingly
definite. He was thinking, as he reviewed the frittered appearance of the
Rev. Stephen Hampton-Evey in Lady Charlotte's hinds, of the possibility
that Lord Ormont, who was reputed to fear nobody, feared her. In which
case, the handsome young woman passing among his associates as the pseudo
Lady Ormont might be the real one after all, and Isabella Lawrence
Finchley prove right in the warning she gave to dogs of chase.

The tutor required by Lady Charlotte was found for her by Mr. Abner.
Their correspondence on the subject filled the space of a week, and then
the gentleman hired to drive a creaky wheel came down from London to
Olmer, arriving late in the evening.

Lady Charlotte's blunt "Oh!" when he entered her room and bowed upon the
announcement of his name, was caused by an instantaneous perception and
refection that it would be prudent to keep her grand-daughter Philippa,
aged between seventeen