nicism very happily;
for the numerous cooks, when out of the kitchen, will furnish a piquant
dish. Thus, a jewel-eyed girl of half English origin (a wounded
British officer is amiably nursed in a castle near the famous Peninsula
battlefield, etc.), running wild down the streets of Seville, is picked
up by Lord Ormont, made to discard her tambourine, brought over to our
shores, and allowed the decoration of his name, without the legitimate
adornment of his title. Discontented with her position after a time,
she now pushes boldly to claim the place which will be most effective
in serving her as a bath. She has, by general consent, beauty; she must,
seeing that she counts influential friends, have witchery. Those who
have seen her riding and driving beside her lord, speak of Andalusian
grace, Oriental lustre, fit qualification for the fair slave of a
notoriously susceptible old warrior.

She won a party in the widening gossip world; and enough of a party in
the regent world to make a stream. Pretending to be the actual Countess
of Ormont, though not publicly acknowledged as his countess by the earl,
she had on her side the strenuous few who knew and liked her, some
who were pleased compassionately to patronize, all idle admirers of a
shadowed beautiful woman at bay, the devotees of any beauty in distress,
and such as had seen, such as imagined they had seen, such as could
paint a mental picture of a lady of imposing stature, persuasive
appearance, pathetic history, and pronounce her to be unjustly treated,
with a general belief that she was visible and breathing. She had the
ready enthusiasts, the responsive sentimentalists, and an honest
active minor number, of whom not every one could be declared perfectly
unspotted in public estimation, however innocent under verdict of the
courts of law.

Against her was the livid cloud-bank over a flowery field, that has
not yet spoken audible thunder: the terrible aggregate social woman,
of man's creation, hated by him, dreaded, scorned, satirized, and
nevertheless, upheld, esteemed, applauded: a mark of civilization, on
to which our human society must hold as long as we have nothing humaner.
She exhibits virtue, with face of waxen angel, with paw of desert
beast, and blood of victims on it. Her fold is a genial climate and
the material pleasures for the world's sheepy: worshipping herself, she
claims the sanctification of a performed religion. She is gentle when
unassailed, going