o think themselves at the top of the tree!" Mrs. Hazeldine would urge,
with a curious conglomeration of ideas, sacred and profane.

But Vera was indifferent to the honour of becoming acquainted with his
Royal Highness.

Another of Mrs. Hazeldine's troubles was that she absolutely refused to
be photographed.

"Your portrait might be in every shop window if you chose!" Mrs.
Hazeldine would exclaim, despairingly.

"I may be very depraved, Cissy," Vera would answer, indignantly, "but I
have not yet sunk so low as to desire that every draper's assistant may
have the privilege of buying my likeness for a shilling to stick up on
his mantelshelf, with a tight-rope dancer on one side, and a burlesque
actress on the other!"

"My dear, it is done by every one; and women who are beautiful as you are
ought not to mind being admired."

"But I prefer being admired by my friends only, and by those of my own
class. I have no ambition to expose myself, even in effigy, in a shop
window for the edification of street boys and city clerks."

"Well, you can't help your name having been in _Vanity Fair_ this week!"

"No, and I only wish I could get hold of the man who put it there!" cried
Miss Nevill, viciously; and it is certain that unfortunate literary
person would not have relished the interview.

A "beauty" with such strange and unnatural views was, it must be
confessed, as much of a trial as a triumph to an anxious chaperon.

There was a certain amount of fashionable routine, the daily treadmill
of pleasure, to which, however, Vera submitted readily enough, and even
extracted a good deal of enjoyment out of it. There was the morning
saunter into the Row, the afternoons spent at garden parties or
"at-homes," the evenings filled up with dinner parties, to be followed
almost invariably by balls lasting late into the night. All these things
repeat themselves year after year: they are utter weariness to some of
us, but to her they were still new, and Vera entered into the daily whirl
of the London season with an amount of zest which was almost a surprise
to herself.

Just at first there had been a daily terror upon her, that of meeting Sir
John Kynaston or his brother; but London is a large place, and you may go
out to different houses for many nights running without ever coming
across the friend or the foe whom you desire or dread most to encounter.

After a little while, she forgot to glance hurriedly and fearfully around
her