Darrell's grand face lighted up—his mellow laugh, unrestrained, though low, echoed her sportive tones; her youth, her joyous- ness were irresistibly contagious. Alban Morley watched ob- servant, while interchanging talk with her attendant comrades, young men of high ton, but who belonged to that jeunesse doree, with which the surface of life patrician is frittered over—young men with few ideas, fewer duties—but with plenty of leisure— plenty of health—plenty of money in their pockets—plenty of debts to their tradesmen—daring at Melton—scheming at Tat- tersall's—pride to maiden aunts—plague to thrifty fathers— fickle lovers, but solid matches—in brief, fast livers, who get through their youth betimes, and who, for the most part, middle- aged before they are thirty—tamed by wedlock—sobered by the responsibilities that come with the cares of property and the dignities of rank—undergo abrupt metamorphosis into chairmen of quarter sessions—county members, or decorous peers—their ideas enriched as their duties grow—their opinions, once loose as willows to the wind, stiffening into the palisades of fenced pro- priety—valuable, busy men, changed as Henry V., when, coming into the cares of state, he said to the Chief Justice, " There is my hand; " and to Sir John Falstaff,
"I know thee not, old man; Fall to thy prayers!"
But, meanwhile, the elite of this jeunesse doree glittered round Flora Vyvyan: not a regular beauty like Lady Adela—not a fine girl like Miss Vipont, but such a light, faultless figure— such a pretty, radiant face—more womanly for affecting to be manlike—Hebe aping Thalestris. Flora, too, was an heiress— an only child—spoiled, wilful—not at all accomplished (my belief is that accomplishments are thought great bores by the jeunesse doree)—no accomplishment except horsemanship, with a slight knack at billiards, and the capacity to take three whiffs from a Spanish cigarette. That last was adorable—four offers had been advanced to her hand on that merit alone. (N.B. Young ladies do themselves no good with the Jeunesse doree, which, in our time, is a lover that rather smokes than "sighs like furnace," by advertising their horror of cigars.) You would suppose that Flora Vyvyan must be coarse—vulgar perhaps; not at all; she was piquante—original; and did the oddest things with the air and look of the highest breeding. Fairies can not be vulgar, no matter what they do; they may take the strangest liberties—pinch the maids, turn the house topsy-turvy; but they are ever the darlings of grace and poetry. Flora Vy-
