wonders for me with a pretty (by courtesy) little Oriental whose forty thousand pounds have lately been suggesting themselves in the shape of a new system of finance."
"And what oriental lure can tempt you to risk your complexion in the city?"
"Oh, a removed one: Miss Goulburn."
Louisa Emma Anastasia Goulburn had fewer drawbacks than most heiresses. Her father was one of those aborigines whose early history was, like most early histories, involve in considerable obscurity. "Nothing in life became him like the leaving it;" for he left one fair daughter and forty thousand pounds to benefit posterity. A sentimental friendship formed at school with a damsel some years her senior, whose calculating talents Mr. Hume himself might envy, induced her, on her friend's marriage, to settle with her in Harley Street; and this friend having neither brother nor brother-in-law, the fair Louisa Emma remained, rather to her own surprise, unappropriated at four-and-twenty. As to characteristics, she had none; and, to use a simile to describe her, she was like that little volume "The Golden Lyre," whose only merit was being printed in golden letters.
