me again. I
understand it all. He talked exactly so to me when he came to Newport
last summer. You must take matters easy, my dear,--you, with your
beauty, and your style, and your money. Why, you can lead all New
York captive! Forty fellows like Charlie are not worth spoiling one's
dinner for. Come, cheer up; positively I shan't let you be blue,
_ma reine_. Let me ring for your maid to dress you for dinner. _Au
revoir_."

The fact was, that Mrs. Lillie, having formerly set down this lovely
Charlie on the list of her own adorers, had small sympathy with the
sentimental romance of her friend.

"What a fool she makes of herself!" she thought, as she contemplated
her own sylph-like figure and wonderful freshness of complexion in the
glass. "Don't I know Charlie Ferrola? he wants her to get him into
fashionable life, and knows the way to do it. To think of that stout,
middle-aged party imagining that Charlie Ferrola's going to die for
her charms! it's too funny! How stout the dear old thing does get, to
be sure!"

[Illustration: MR. CHARLIE FERROLA.]

It will be observed here that our dear Lillie did not want for
perspicacity. There is nothing so absolutely clear-sighted, in certain
directions, as selfishness. Entire want of sympathy with others clears
up one's vision astonishingly, and enables us to see all the weak
points and ridiculous places of our neighbors in the most accurate
manner possible.

As to Mr. Charlie Ferrola, our Lillie was certainly in the right in
respect to him. He was one of those blossoms of male humanity that
seem as expressly designed by nature for the ornamentation of ladies'
boudoirs, as an Italian greyhound: he had precisely the same graceful,
shivery adaptation to live by petting and caresses. His tastes were
all so exquisite that it was the most difficult thing in the world to
keep him out of misery a moment. He was in a chronic state of disgust
with something or other in our lower world from morning till night.

His profession was nominally that of architecture and landscape
gardening; but, in point of fact, consisted in telling certain rich,
_blase_, stupid, fashionable people how they could quickest get rid of
their money. He ruled despotically in the Follingsbee halls: he bought
and rejected pictures and jewelry, ordered and sent off furniture,
with the air of an absolute master; amusing himself meanwhile
with running a French romance with the handsome mistress of the
establishment