or to a supper-party she honours with
her presence, she has been known to wrap herself in her sealskins, and
to depart indignantly in her private brougham.

She possesses the secret of nocturnal youth, and her eyes are warranted
to kill across a supper-table, yet she is no longer young, and sometimes
betrays herself by her anecdotes of familiar associations with "boys"
who have long since passed into respectability and middle-age. Though
she adores diamonds, she frequently sells them, and includes in the
transaction those who have purchased them for her; yet she retains and
wears as many jewels as would furnish forth a Duchess in a _Bow Bells_
novel. But her elbow gloves, which rarely come within a measurable
distance of godliness, inevitably proclaim the Corinthian.

She is constant only in her love of excitement, and in her devotion to
change, whether it be of the persons of her adorers, or of the colour of
her hair. Having early in life learnt the lesson that only those who
possess are happy, she endeavours to assure herself against misery by
transferring to herself the wealth of those who fall under her
influence, or aspire to her affections. She apes what she conceives to
be the manners of good society by a languid affectation of refinement
and a supercilious drawl, yet she has been known to clothe herself in
objurgations as in a tea-gown, and to repel with scurrility the advances
of those who are not moneyed. She earns a certain popularity by the
display of a kind of rough good-nature, and the possession of a pet
poodle. She has been seen on a coach at Ascot, and in a launch at Henley
Regatta, together with a select company of those who cultivate
excitement by not looking at the exertions of horses or athletes, whilst
they themselves drink Champagne. Nor is she unknown in the boxes of the
Gaiety or the Avenue, whither she repairs after dining at the Cafe
Royal. She goes, but not alone, to Monte Carlo, and returns, under a
different escort, to London, after losing a great deal of the money of
other people.

She was once married to a racing man of shady reputation and great
wealth, but having soon wearied of the mock-respectability of a
quasi-matrimonial existence, she makes the acquaintance of Mr. Justice
BUTT at a moment when he is engaged neither upon the probate of wills
nor on the collisions of ships. Yet her dislike of one husband who
happened for a time to be her own has not in the least impaired her
affe