es and night-clubs, exchanges sly look for sly look and soiled
mouth for soiled kisses, in its endeavours to pass itself off as that
wonder figure which, radiant of brow and humorous of mouth, deep of
breast and profound of thought, stands motionless in high and by-ways
with hands outstretched to those futile figures, blindly hurrying past
the Love they fondly imagine is to be found in the front row of the
chorus, the last row of the cinema, or the unrestrained licence of the
country house.

Jill had never flirted and therefore had known no kiss excepting her
father's matutinal and nocturnal peck. She looked upon her beautiful
body as some jewel to be placed in the hands of the man she loved upon
her wedding-night, so it was as unsoiled and as untainted as her mind,
although she knew that once she loved she would go down before that
mighty force as a tree before a storm. Dull, you will say all this.
May be! but mighty refreshing in these days when amourette follows
amourette as surely as Monday follows Sunday, the only difference in
the stock being the trade mark, which stamps the one with the outline
of a perfect limousine, and the other with the front seat on the top of
an omnibus; though believe me the Mondays and Sundays differ not at all.

Jill's ideas on franchise and suffrage, and a "good time" as seen from
the standpoint of the average society girl or woman were absolutely nil.

She wanted first of all a master, then a home, and then children, many
of them.

Her idea of love was utter submission to the man she should love. Her
ideal of happiness his happiness, and although she had no fixed idea of
her home, she was positively certain she did not want lodge gates and
forelock-pulling peasantry, nor tame deer inside elaborate palings, nor
the white-capped nurse stiff with starch trundling a perambulator with
a fat, ordinary, rosy heir to the palings, deer, and pullers of locks.

So she sweetly but very definitely said no to a certain millionaire,
who had earned his banking account and the thanks of many thousands by
his invention of a non-popping champagne cork, and who, adoring the
girl, had hastened the very day the news of the smash had spread
through the country, like fire on a windy day, to lay his portly self
and all that thereunto adhered at her beautiful feet. The disgust of
her relatives upon her want of common sense was outspoken; for having
overstocked their respective quivers with commonplace f