Her figure was perhaps too tall, and somewhat too stout also; but its size was relieved by the delicacy of those hands and feet of which Miss Valencia was most pardonably proud, and by that indescribable lissomeness and lazy grace which Irishwomen inherit, perhaps, with their tinge of southern blood; and when, in half an hour, she reappeared, with broad straw-hat, and gown tucked up a la bergere over the striped Welsh petticoat, perhaps to show off the ankles, which only looked the finer for a pair of heavy laced boots, Elsley honestly felt it a pleasure to look at her, and a still greater pleasure to talk to her, and to be talked to by her; while she, bent on making herself agreeable, partly from real good taste, partly from natural good-nature, and partly, too, because she saw in his eyes that he admired her, chatted sentiment about all heaven and earth.

For to Miss Valencia—­it is sad to have to say it—­admiration had been now, for three years, her daily bread.  She had lived in the thickest whirl of the world, and, as most do for a while, found it a very pleasant place.

She had flirted—­with how many must not be told; and perhaps with more than one with whom she had no business to flirt.  Little Scoutbush had remonstrated with her on some such affair, but she had silenced him with an Irish jest,—­“You’re a fisherman, Freddy; and when you can’t catch salmon, you catch trout; and when you can’t catch trout, you’ll whip on the shallow for poor little gubbahawns, and say that it is all to keep your hand in—­and so do I.”

The old ladies said that this was the reason why she had not married; the men, however, asserted that no one dare marry her; and one club-oracle had given it as his opinion that no man in his rational senses was to be allowed to have anything to do with her, till she had been well jilted two or three times, to take the spirit out of her:  but that catastrophe had not yet occurred, and Miss Valencia still reigned “triumphant and alone,” though her aunt, old Lady Knockdown, moved all the earth, and some dirty places, too, below the earth, to get the wild Irish girl off her hands; “for,” quoth she, “I feel with Valencia, indeed, just like one of those men who carry about little dogs in the Quadrant.  I always pity the poor men so, and think how happy they must be when they have sold one.  It is one chance less, you know, of having it bite them horribly, and then run away after all.”

There was, however, no more real harm in Valencia, than there is in every child of Adam.  Town frivolity had not corrupted her.  She was giddy, given up to enjoyment of the present:  but there was not a touch, of meanness about her:  and if she was selfish, as every one must needs be whose thoughts are of pleasure, admiration, and success, she was so unintentionally; and she would have been shocked and pained at being told that she was anything but the most kind-hearted and generous creature on earth.