into insignificance beside you: such a
flow of language deserves a better audience. But really, Teddy, I never
heard so extraordinary a story. To marry a woman, and never have the
curiosity to raise her veil to see whether she was ugly or pretty! It
is inconceivable! He must be made of ice."

"He is warm-hearted, and one of the jolliest fellows you could meet.
Curiously enough, from a letter he wrote me just before starting he
gave me the impression that he believed his wife to be not only plain,
but vulgar in appearance."

"And is she?"

"She is positively lovely. Rather small, perhaps, but exquisitely fair,
with large laughing blue eyes, and the most fetching manner. If he had
raised her veil, I don't believe he would ever have gone abroad to
cultivate the dusky nigger."

"What became of her,--'poor maid forlorn?'"

"She gave up 'milking the cow with the crumpled horn,' and the country
generally, and came up to London, where she took a house, went into
society, and was the rage all last season."

"Why did you not tell him how pretty she was?" impatiently.

"Because I was in Ireland at the time on leave, and heard nothing of it
until I received that letter telling of the marriage and his departure.
I was thunderstruck, you may be sure, but it was too late then to
interfere. Some one told me the other day he is on his way home."

"'When Greek meets Greek' we know what happens," says Molly. "I think
_their_ meeting will be awkward."

"Rather. She is to be at Herst this autumn: she was a ward of your
grandfather's."

"Don't fall in love with her, Teddy."

"How can I, when you have put it out of my power? There is no room in
my heart for any one but Molly Bawn. Besides, it would be energy
wasted, as she is encased in steel. A woman in her equivocal position,
and possessed of so much beauty, might be supposed to find it difficult
to steer her bark safely through all the temptations of a London
season; yet the flattery she received, and all the devotion that was
laid at her feet, touched her no more than if she was ninety, instead
of twenty-three."

"Yet what a risk it is! How will it be some day if she falls in love?
as they say all people do once in their lives."

"Why, then, she will have her _mauvais quart-d'heure_, like the
rest of us. Up to the present she has enjoyed her life to the utmost,
and finds everything _couleur de rose_."

"Would it not be charming," says Molly, with much _empressement_,
"i