but possibly to some of my friends it makes a little
difference. That girl doesn't care a button. She knows best of all what
I think of Flora Saunt."

"And what may your opinion be?"

"Why, that she's not worth troubling about--an idiot too abysmal."

"Doesn't she care for that?"

"Just enough, as you saw, to hug me till I cry out. She's too pleased
with herself for anything else to matter."

"Surely, my dear friend," I rejoined, "she has a good deal to be pleased
with!"

"So every one tells her, and so you would have told her if I had given
you the chance. However, that doesn't signify either, for her vanity is
beyond all making or mending. She believes in herself, and she's
welcome, after all, poor dear, having only herself to look to. I've
seldom met a young woman more completely free to be silly. She has a
clear course--she'll make a showy finish."

"Well," I replied, "as she probably will reduce many persons to the same
degraded state, her partaking of it won't stand out so much."

"If you mean that the world's full of twaddlers I quite agree with you!"
cried Mrs. Meldrum, trumpeting her laugh half across the Channel.

I had after this to consider a little what she would call my mother's
son, but I didn't let it prevent me from insisting on her making me
acquainted with Flora Saunt; indeed I took the bull by the horns, urging
that she had drawn the portrait of a nature which common charity now
demanded of her to put into relation with a character really fine. Such
a frail creature was just an object of pity. This contention on my part
had at first of course been jocular; but strange to say it was quite the
ground I found myself taking with regard to our young lady after I had
begun to know her. I couldn't have said what I felt about her except
that she was undefended; from the first of my sitting with her there
after dinner, under the stars--that was a week at Folkestone of balmy
nights and muffled tides and crowded chairs--I became aware both that
protection was wholly absent from her life and that she was wholly
indifferent to its absence. The odd thing was that she was not
appealing: she was abjectly, divinely conceited, absurdly fantastically
pleased. Her beauty was as yet all the world to her, a world she had
plenty to do to live in. Mrs. Meldrum told me more about her, and there
was nothing that, as the centre of a group of giggling, nudging
spectators, Flora wasn't ready to tell about