much."

"If you mean that the world's full of twaddlers I quite agree with you!"
cried Mrs. Meldrum, trumpeting her laugh half across the Channel.

I had after this to consider a little what she would call my mother's
son, but I didn't let it prevent me from insisting on her making me
acquainted with Flora Saunt; indeed I took the bull by the horns, urging
that she had drawn the portrait of a nature which common charity now
demanded that she should put into relation with a character really fine.
Such a frail creature was just an object of pity. This contention on
my part had at first of course been jocular; but strange to say it was
quite the ground I found myself taking with regard to our young lady
after I had begun to know her. I couldn't have said what I felt about
her except that she was undefended; from the first of my sitting with
her there after dinner, under the stars--that was a week at Folkestone
of balmy nights and muffled tides and crowded chairs--I became aware
both that protection was wholly absent from her life and that she was
wholly indifferent to its absence.

The odd thing was that she was not appealing: she was abjectly, divinely
conceited, absurdly, fantastically happy. Her beauty was as yet all the
world to her, a world she had plenty to do to live in. Mrs. Meldrum told
me more about her, and there was nothing that, as the centre of a
group of giggling, nudging spectators, she was not ready to tell about
herself. She held her little court in the crowd, upon the grass,
playing her light over Jews and Gentiles, completely at ease in all
promiscuities. It was an effect of these things that from the very
first, with every one listening, I could mention that my main business
with her would be just to have a go at her head and to arrange in that
view for an early sitting. It would have been as impossible, I think,
to be impertinent to her as it would have been to throw a stone at a
plate-glass window; so any talk that went forward on the basis of her
loveliness was the most natural thing in the world and immediately
became the most general and sociable. It was when I saw all this that I
judged how, though it was the last thing she asked for, what one would
ever most have at her service was a curious compassion. That sentiment
was coloured by the vision of the dire exposure of a being whom vanity
had put so off her guard. Hers was the only vanity I have ever known
that made its possessor superlatively