PROLOGUE
* * * * *
THE WHITE RIBAND
OR
A YOUNG FEMALE'S FOLLY
Prologue
That was how they spoke of her story in the duchy's drawing-rooms;
for what had Loveday been, at the most charitable count, but a young
female--less humanly speaking, even a young person? And what was the
spring of her mad crimes but folly, mere weak, feminine folly? Even
an improper motive--one of those over-powering passions one reads
about rather surreptitiously in the delightful works of that dear,
naughty, departed Lord Byron--would have been somehow more ...
more ... satisfactory. One could only whisper such a sentiment, but
it stirred in many a feminine breast when Loveday's story set the
ripples of reprobation circling some twenty miles, till the incomparably
bigger pebble of the Prince of Wales' nuptials made correspondingly
greater waves, even though they took a month or so to spread all its
fascinating details so far from the Metropolis. What, after all, as a
topic of conversation, was Loveday's ill-gotten gaud compared with the
thrill of the new Alexandra jacket with its pegtop sleeves? One should
hold a right proportion in all things.
Thus the duchy's drawing-rooms. In the back parlours of the little
country-town shops, where an aristocracy as rigid in its own
respectable--and respectful--way, held its courts of justice, Loveday's
story was referred to with a slight difference. She had become a "young
besom," and her crime was what you might have expected from the bye-blow
of an ear-ringed foreigner, who bowed down to idols instead of the laws
of God and the British Constitution.
In her own little seaport and the farms of the countryside, Loveday
descended lower still--she became a "faggot." Thus from one born to
wield a broom we see how she descended, with the declination in scale of
the chatterboxes, to the broom itself, and from that to the rough
material for it. Which things are a parable, could one but fit the moral
to them as neatly as did everyone who discussed Loveday, in whatever
terms, fit the due warning on to her tale.
And this moral, for all who ran, but more particularly for those who
danced, to read, was as follows:--
It all came of wanting things above your station.
"How simply does your sex dispose of the problems of life, ma'am,"
replied Mr. Constantine to Miss Flora Le Pettit, the heiress of Ignores
Manor, when she supplied him with this m
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