"It is very strange!" she thought. "I have seen that man about town the last five-and-twenty years--ever since he was a mere boy, taken up and petted by Adeline Patchouli for some piece of witty Brummelian impudence he said to her on his first introduction--and he has never sought my acquaintance before, but always seemed to be quite aware of my dislike to him and all his set. It is very grievous he should have chosen the very season I have poor dear Rosediamond's daughter with me; but it is always my fate--if a thing can happen to annoy me it always will!"
With which Lady Marabout, getting fairly distracted under the iron hand of adverse fate, and the ruthless surveillance of the Hautton glass, invented an impromptu necessity for immediate shopping at Lewis and Allonby's, and drove off the ground at the sole moment of interest the match possessed for her--viz., when Carruthers was rattling down Hautton's stumps, and getting innings innumerable for the Household.
"Mais ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte;" the old proverb's so true we wear it threadbare with repeating it! Lady Marabout might as well have stayed on Lord's ground, and not lacerated her feelings by leaving at the very hour of the Household Cavalry's triumphs, for any good that she did thereby. The Hautton eye-glass had lighted on Chandos Cheveley, and Chandos Cheveley's eye-glass on Rosediamond's daughter;--and Cecil Ormsby arched her eyebrows, and gave her parasol a little impatient shake as they quitted Lord's.
"Lady Marabout, I never could have believed you ill-natured; you interrupted my ball last night, and my conversation this morning! I shall scold you if you ever do so again. And now tell me (as curiosity is a weakness incidental to all women, no woman ought to refuse to relieve it in another) why _are_ you so prejudiced against that very handsome, and very amusing person?"
"Prejudiced, my dear child! I am not in the least prejudiced," returned Lady Marabout. (Nobody ever admitted to a prejudice that _I_ ever heard. It's a plant that grows in all gardens, and is sedulously matted up, watered, and strengthened; but invariably disavowed by its sturdiest cultivators.) "As for Chandos Cheveley, I merely mentioned to you what all town knows about him; and the dislike I have to his class is one of principle, not of prejudice."