Lady Judith acknowledged the introduction with the air of a queen to whom courtiers and compliments were as the gadflies of summer.  She fanned herself listlessly, and stared about her while Mr. Topsparkle was talking.

“I vow, there is Mrs. Margetson,” she exclaimed, recognizing an acquaintance across the crowd:  “I have not seen her for a century.  Heavens, how old and yellow she is looking—­yellower even than you, Mattie!” this last by way of aside to her plain cousin.

“I hope you bear me no malice for my pertinacity last night, Lady Judith,” murmured Topsparkle, insinuatingly.

“Malice, my good sir!  I protest I never bear malice.  To be malicious, one’s feelings must be engaged; and you would hardly expect mine to be concerned in the mystifications of a dancing-room.”

She looked over his head as she talked to him, still on the watch for familiar faces among the crowd, smiling at one, bowing at another.  Mr. Topsparkle was savage at not being able to engage her attention.  At Venice, whence he had come lately, all the women had courted him, hanging upon his words, adoring him as the keenest wit of his day.

He was an attenuated and rather effeminate person, exquisitely dressed and powdered, and not without a suspicion of rouge upon his hollow cheeks or of Vandyke brown upon his delicately penciled eyebrows.  He, like Lord Bramber, presented the wreck of manly beauty; but whereas Bramber suggested a three-master of goodly bulk and tonnage, battered but still weather-proof and seaworthy, Topsparkle had the air of a delicate pinnace which time and tempest had worn to a mere phantasmal bark that the first storm would scatter into ruin.

He had hardly the air of a gentleman, Judith thought, watching him keenly all the while she seemed to ignore his existence.  He was too fine, too highly trained for the genuine article; he lacked that easy inborn grace of the man in whom good manners are hereditary.  There was nothing of the Cit about him; but there was the exaggerated elegance, the exotic grace, of a man who has too studiously cultivated the art of being a fine gentleman; who has learned his manners in dubious paths, from petites maitresses and prime donne, rather than from statesmen and princes.

On this, and on many a subsequent meeting, Lady Judith was just uncivil enough to fan the flame of Vivian Topsparkle’s passion.  He had begun in a somewhat philandering spirit, not quite determined whether Lord Bramber’s daughter were worthy of him; but her hauteur made him her slave.  Had she been civil he would have given more account to those old stories about Lavendale, and would have been inclined to draw back before finally committing himself.  But a woman who could afford to be rude to the best match in England must needs be above all suspicion.  Had her reputation been seriously damaged she would have caught at the chance of rehabilitating herself by a rich marriage.  Had she been civil