o the Duchess, but at the moment engaged in no
conversation, stood Mr Bott. There was another lady there, who
stood very high in the world, and whom Lady Monk was very glad to
welcome--the young Marchioness of Hartletop. She was in slight
mourning; for her father-in-law, the late Marquis, had died no
t yet quite six months since. Very beautiful she was, and one whose
presence at their houses ladies and gentlemen prized alike. She never
said silly things, like the Duchess, never was troublesome as to
people's conduct to her, was always gracious, yet was never led away
into intimacies, was without peer the best-dressed woman in London,
and yet gave herself no airs;--and then she was so exquisitely
beautiful. Her smile was loveliness itself. There were, indeed,
people who said that it meant nothing; but then, what should the
smile of a young married woman mean? She had not been born in the
purple, like Lady Glencora, her father being a country clergyman who
had never reached a higher grade than that of an archdeacon; but she
knew the ways of high life, and what an exigeant husband would demand
of her, much better than poor Glencora. She would have spoken of no
man as a baboon with a bristly beard. She never talked of the long
and the short of it. She did not wander out o' nights in winter among
the ruins. She made no fast friendship with ladies whom her lord did
not like. She had once, indeed, been approached by a lover since she
had been married,--Mr Palliser himself having been the offender,--but
she had turned the affair to infinite credit and profit, had gained
her husband's closest confidence by telling him of it all, had yet
not brought on any hostile collision, and had even dismissed her
lover without annoying him. But then Lady Hartletop was a miracle of
a woman!

Lady Glencora was no miracle. Though born in the purple, she was
made of ordinary flesh and blood, and as she entered Lady Monk's
little room, hardly knew how to recover herself sufficiently for
the purposes of ordinary conversation. "Dear Lady Glencora, do come
in for a moment to my den. We were so sorry not to have you at
Monkshade. We heard such terrible things about your health." Lady
Glencora said that it was only a cold,--a bad cold. "Oh, yes; we
heard,--something about moonlight and ruins. So like you, you know.
I love that sort of thing, above all people; but it doesn't do;
does it? Circumstances are so exacting. I think you know Lady
Hartletop;