the eternity of your devotion.

Nor did it at all interfere with the sincerity of his worship that the
Zu-Zu was at the prettiest little box in the world, in the neighborhood
of Market Harborough, which he had taken for her, and had been at the
meet that day in her little toy trap, with its pair of snowy ponies and
its bright blue liveries that drove so desperately through his finances,
and had ridden his hunter Maraschino with immense dash and spirit for a
young lady who had never done anything but pirouette till the last six
months, and a total and headlong disregard of "purlers" very reckless
in a white-skinned, bright-eyed, illiterate, avaricious little beauty,
whose face was her fortune; and who most assuredly would have been
adored no single moment longer, had she scarred her fair, tinted cheek
with the blackthorn, or started as a heroine with a broken nose like
Fielding's cherished Amelia. The Zu-Zu might rage, might sulk, might
even swear all sorts of naughty Mabille oaths, most villainously
pronounced, at the ascendancy of her haughty, unapproachable patrician
rival--she did do all these things--but Bertie would not have been
the consummate tactician, the perfect flirt, the skilled and steeled
campaigner in the boudoirs that he was, if he had not been equal to the
delicate task of managing both the peeress and the ballet-dancer with
inimitable ability; even when they placed him in the seemingly difficult
dilemma of meeting them both, with twenty yards between them, on the
neutral ground of the gathering to see the Pytchley or the Tailby throw
off--a task he had achieved with victorious brilliance more than once
already this season.

"You drive a team, Beauty--never drive a team," the Seraph had said on
occasion, over a confidential "sherry-peg" in the mornings, meaning
by the metaphor of a team Lady Guenevere, the Zu-Zu, and various other
contemporaries in Bertie's affections. "Nothing on earth so dangerous;
your leader will bolt, or your off-wheeler will turn sulky, or your
young one will passage and make the very deuce of a row; they'll never
go quiet till the end, however clever your hand is on the ribbons. Now,
I'll drive six-in-hand as soon as any man--drove a ten-hander last year
in the Bois--when the team comes out of the stables; but I'm hanged if
I'd risk my neck with managing even a pair of women. Have one clean out
of the shafts before you trot out another!"

To which salutary advice Cecil only ga