the grace of cheerful
acquiescence. That in the gay world flatterers should gather round a
young wife so eminently beautiful, and so wholly left by her husband
to her own guidance, was inevitable. But at the very first insinuated
compliment or pathetic condolence, Lady Montfort, so meek in her
household, was haughty enough to have daunted Lovelace. She was thus
very early felt to be beyond temptation, and the boldest passed on, nor
presumed to tempt. She was unpopular; called "proud and freezing;" she
did not extend the influence of "The House;" she did not confirm its
fashion,--fashion which necessitates social ease, and which no rank, no
wealth, no virtue, can of themselves suffice to give. And this failure
on her part was a great offence in the eyes of the House of Vipont. "She
does absolutely nothing for us," said Lady Selina; but Lady Selina in
her heart was well pleased that to her in reality thus fell, almost
without a rival, the female representation, in the great world, of the
Vipont honours. Lady Selina was fashion itself.

Lady Montfort's social peculiarity was in the eagerness with which she
sought the society of persons who enjoyed a reputation for superior
intellect, whether statesmen, lawyers, authors, philosophers, artists.
Intellectual intercourse seemed as if it was her native atmosphere,
from which she was habitually banished, to which she returned with an
instinctive yearning and a new zest of life; yet was she called, even
here, nor seemingly without justice, capricious and unsteady in her
likings. These clever personages, after a little while, all seemed to
disappoint her expectations of them; she sought the acquaintance of
each with cordial earnestness; slid from the acquaintance with weary
languor,--never, after all, less alone than when alone.

And so wondrous lovely! Nothing so rare as beauty of the high type:
genius and beauty, indeed, are both rare; genius, which is the beauty
of the mind,-beauty, which is the gen ius of the body. But, of the two,
beauty is the rarer. All of us can count on our fingers some forty
or fifty persons of undoubted and illustrious genius, including those
famous in action, letters, art. But can any of us remember to have seen
more than four or five specimens of first-rate ideal beauty? Whosoever
had seen Lady Montfort would have ranked her amongst such four or five
in his recollection. There was in her face that lustrous dazzle to which
the Latin poet, perhaps, re