ctable"
certainly did not fit the Bond Street young man. He looked slightly
exotic! That, no doubt, had set Sir Seymour against him. He was not of
the usual type of club man. He "intrigued" her terribly. As the Duchess
of Wellingborough would have phrased it, she was "crazy" to know him.
She even said to herself that she did not care whether he was on the
shady side of the line or not. Abruptly a strong democratic feeling took
possession of her. In the affections, in the passions, differences of
rank did not count.

Rupert Louth had married a Crouch!

Lady Sellingworth looked at his note which was still in her hand, and
memories of the disdainful young beauty "queening it"--that really was
the only appropriate expression--"queening it" with vulgar gentility
among the simple mannered, well-bred people to whom Louth belonged rose
up in her mind. How terrible were those definite airs of being a lady!
How truly unspeakable were those august condescensions of the undeniable
Crouch!

When Lady Sellingworth mused on them her sense of the equality before
God of all human creatures decidedly weakened.

She wrote a brief letter to Louth declining to "speak up" to the great
dressmaker. "Little Bertha" must manage without her aid. She made this
quite clear, but she wrote very charmingly, and sent her love at the end
to little Bertha. That done, almost violently she dismissed Louth and
his wife from her mind and became democratic again!

Putting Louth and little Bertha aside, when it came to the affections
and the passions what could one be but just a human being? Rank did not
count when the heart was awake. She felt intensely human just then. And
she continued to feel so. Life was quickened for her by the presence in
London of a stranger whom nobody knew. This might be a humiliating fact.
But how many facts connected with human beings if sternly considered are
humiliating!

And nobody knew of her fact.

Every morning at this time she woke up with the hope of a little
adventure during the day. When she went out she was alive to the
possibility of a new encounter with the unknown man. And she met him
several times, walking about town, sometimes alone, sometimes with the
old lady, and once with another man, a thin sallow individual who looked
like a Frenchman. And each time he sent her a glance which seemed almost
to implore her to know him.

But how could she know him? She never met him in society. Evidently he
knew no one