shionable society in London
and Bath by bringing home, from one of his journeys abroad, a beautiful,
fascinating, clever, French wife. He, the sleepiest, dullest, most
British Britisher that had ever set a pretty woman yawning, had secured
a brilliant matrimonial prize for which, as all chroniclers aver, there
had been many competitors.

Marguerite St. Just had first made her DEBUT in artistic Parisian
circles, at the very moment when the greatest social upheaval the
world has ever known was taking place within its very walls. Scarcely
eighteen, lavishly gifted with beauty and talent, chaperoned only by
a young and devoted brother, she had soon gathered round her, in
her charming apartment in the Rue Richelieu, a coterie which was as
brilliant as it was exclusive--exclusive, that is to say, only from one
point of view. Marguerite St. Just was from principle and by conviction
a republican--equality of birth was her motto--inequality of fortune
was in her eyes a mere untoward accident, but the only inequality she
admitted was that of talent. "Money and titles may be hereditary,"
she would say, "but brains are not," and thus her charming salon was
reserved for originality and intellect, for brilliance and wit, for
clever men and talented women, and the entrance into it was soon looked
upon in the world of intellect--which even in those days and in those
troublous times found its pivot in Paris--as the seal to an artistic
career.

Clever men, distinguished men, and even men of exalted station formed a
perpetual and brilliant court round the fascinating young actress of
the Comedie Francaise, and she glided through republican, revolutionary,
bloodthirsty Paris like a shining comet with a trail behind her of all
that was most distinguished, most interesting, in intellectual Europe.

Then the climax came. Some smiled indulgently and called it an artistic
eccentricity, others looked upon it as a wise provision, in view of the
many events which were crowding thick and fast in Paris just then, but
to all, the real motive of that climax remained a puzzle and a mystery.
Anyway, Marguerite St. Just married Sir Percy Blakeney one fine day,
just like that, without any warning to her friends, without a SOIREE DE
CONTRAT or DINER DE FIANCAILLES or other appurtenances of a fashionable
French wedding.

How that stupid, dull Englishman ever came to be admitted within
the intellectual circle which revolved round "the cleverest woman in