Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and Dan O’Connell, and all other lions and lionesses which had roared for the last sixty years about the Emerald Isle.  There was no one whom she did not know, and nothing she could not talk about.  Married up, when a girl, to a man for whom she did not care, and having no children, she had indemnified herself by many flirtations, and the writing of two or three novels, in which she penned on paper the superfluous feeling which had no vent in real life.  She had deserted, as she grew old, the novel for unfulfilled prophecy; and was a distinguished leader in a distinguished religious coterie:  but she still prided herself upon having a green head upon grey shoulders; and not without reason; for underneath all the worldliness and intrigue, and petty affectation of girlishness, which she contrived to jumble in with her religiosity, beat a young and kindly heart.  So she was charmed with Mr. Vavasour’s manners, and commended them much to Lucia, who, a shrinking girl of seventeen, was peeping at her first season from under Lady Knockdown’s sheltering wing.

“Me dear, let Mr. Vavasour be who he will, he has not only the intellect of a true genius, but what is a great deal better for practical purposes; that is, the manners of one.  Give me the man who will let a woman of our rank say what we like to him, without supposing that he may say what he likes in return; and considers one’s familiarity as an honour, and not as an excuse for taking liberties.  A most agreeable contrast, indeed, to the young men of the present day; who come in their shooting jackets, and talk slang to their partners,—­though really the girls are just as bad,—­and stand with their backs to the fire, and smell of smoke, and go to sleep after dinner, and pay no respect to old age, nor to youth either, I think.  ’Pon me word, Lucia, the answers I’ve heard young gentlemen make to young ladies, this very season,—­they’d have been called out the next morning in my time, me dear.  As for the age of chivalry, nobody expects that to be restored:  but really one might have been spared the substitute for it which, we had when I was young, in the grand air of the old school.  It was a ‘sham,’ I daresay, as they call everything now-a-days:  but really, me dear, a pleasant sham is better to live with than an unpleasant reality, especially when it smells of cigars.”

So it befell that Elsley Vavasour was asked to Lady Knockdown’s, and that there he fell in love with Lucia, and Lucia fell in love with him.

The next winter, old Lord Knockdown, who had been decrepit for some years past, died; and his widow, whose income was under five hundred a year,—­for the estates were entailed, and mortgaged, and everything else which can happen to an Irish property,—­came to live with her nephew, Lord Scoutbush, in Eaton Square, and take such care as she could of Lucia and Valencia.