with
regret from his seat under the evergreen helmet.

Xenia Sabaroff is pleased at the expression. She is too handsome for men
often to speak to her rationally: they usually plunge headlong into
attempts at homage and flattery, of which she is nauseated.

CHAPTER VII.

"How do you like Lord Brandolin?" says Lady Usk, when she can say so
unobserved.

"I like him very much," replies Madame Sabaroff. "He is what one would
expect him to be from his books; and that is so agreeable,--and so
rare."

Dorothy Usk is not pleased. She does not want her Russian ph[oe]nix to
admire Brandolin. She has arranged an alliance in her own mind between
the Princess Sabaroff and her own cousin Alan, Lord Gervase, whom she is
daily expecting at Surrenden. Gervase is a man of some note in diplomacy
and society; she is proud of him, she is attached to him, she desires to
see him ultimately fill all offices of state that the ambition of an
Englishman can aspire to; and Xenia Sabaroff is so enormously rich, as
well as so unusually handsome. It would be a perfectly ideal union; and,
desiring it infinitely, the mistress of Surrenden, with that tact which
distinguishes her, has never named Lord Gervase to the Princess Sabaroff
nor the Princess Sabaroff to Lord Gervase. He is to be at Surrenden in a
week's time. Now she vaguely wishes that Brandolin had not these eight
days' start of him. But then Brandolin, she knows, will only flirt; that
is to say, if the Russian lady allow him to do so: he is an
unconscionable flirt, and never means anything by his tenderest
speeches. Brandolin, she knows, is not a person who will ever marry; he
has lost scores of the most admirable opportunities, and rejected the
fairest and best-filled hands that have been offered to him. To the
orderly mind of Lady Usk, he represents an Ishmael forever wandering in
wild woods, outside the pale of general civilization. She can never see
why people make such a fuss with him. She does not say so, because it is
the fashion to make the fuss, and she never goes against a fashion. A
very moral woman herself, she is only as charitable and elastic as she
is to naughty people because such charity and elasticity is the mark of
good society in the present day. Without it, she would be neither
popular nor well bred; and she would sooner die than fail in being
either.

"Why don't you ever marry, Lord Brandolin?" asks Dorothy Usk. "Why have
you never married?"

"Because h