at any rate, and see what I can send you.'

Robert shook his head, smiling. A common friend of theirs and hers had
once described this little lady to Elsmere by a French sentence which
originally applied to the Duchesse de Choiseul. 'Une charmante petite
fee sortie d'un oeuf enchante!'--so it ran. Certainly, as Elsmere looked
down upon her now, fresh from those squalid death-stricken hovels behind
him, he was brought more abruptly than ever upon the contrasts of life.
Lady Helen wore a green velvet and fur mantle, in the production of
which even Worth had felt some pride; a little green velvet bonnet
perched on her fair hair; one tiny hand, ungloved, seemed ablaze
with diamonds; there were opals and diamonds somewhere at her throat,
gleaming among her sables. But she wore her jewels as carelessly as she
wore her high birth, her quaint, irregular prettiness, or the one or two
brilliant gifts which made her sought after wherever she went. She loved
her opals as she loved all bright things; if it pleased her to wear them
in the morning she wore them; and in five minutes she was capable of
making the sourest Puritan forget to frown on her and them. To Robert
she always seemed the quintessence of breeding, of aristocracy at their
best. All her freaks, her sallies, her absurdities even, were graceful.
At her freest and gayest there were things in her--restraints,
reticences, perceptions--which implied behind her generations of rich,
happy, important people, with ample leisure to cultivate all the more
delicate niceties of social feeling and relation. Robert was often
struck by the curious differences between her and Rose. Rose was far
the handsome; she was at least as clever; and she had a strong
imperious will where Lady Helen had only impulses and sympathies and
_engouements_. But Rose belonged to the class which struggles, where
each individual depends on himself and knows it. Lady Helen had never
struggled for anything--all the best things of the world were hers so
easily that she hardly gave them a thought; or rather, what she had
gathered without pain she held so lightly, she dispensed so lavishly,
that men's eyes followed her, fluttering through life, with much the
same feeling as was struck from Clough's radical hero by the peerless
Lady Maria:--

Live, be lovely, forget us, be beautiful, even to proudness,
Even for their poor sakes whose happiness is to behold you;
Live, be uncaring, be joyous, be sumptuous