PROLOGUE

* * * * *

THE WHITE RIBAND

OR

A YOUNG FEMALE’S FOLLY

Prologue

That was how they spoke of her story in the duchy’s drawing-rooms; for what had Loveday been, at the most charitable count, but a young female—­less humanly speaking, even a young person?  And what was the spring of her mad crimes but folly, mere weak, feminine folly?  Even an improper motive—­one of those over-powering passions one reads about rather surreptitiously in the delightful works of that dear, naughty, departed Lord Byron—­would have been somehow more ... more ... satisfactory.  One could only whisper such a sentiment, but it stirred in many a feminine breast when Loveday’s story set the ripples of reprobation circling some twenty miles, till the incomparably bigger pebble of the Prince of Wales’ nuptials made correspondingly greater waves, even though they took a month or so to spread all its fascinating details so far from the Metropolis.  What, after all, as a topic of conversation, was Loveday’s ill-gotten gaud compared with the thrill of the new Alexandra jacket with its pegtop sleeves?  One should hold a right proportion in all things.

Thus the duchy’s drawing-rooms.  In the back parlours of the little country-town shops, where an aristocracy as rigid in its own respectable—­and respectful—­way, held its courts of justice, Loveday’s story was referred to with a slight difference.  She had become a “young besom,” and her crime was what you might have expected from the bye-blow of an ear-ringed foreigner, who bowed down to idols instead of the laws of God and the British Constitution.

In her own little seaport and the farms of the countryside, Loveday descended lower still—­she became a “faggot.”  Thus from one born to wield a broom we see how she descended, with the declination in scale of the chatterboxes, to the broom itself, and from that to the rough material for it.  Which things are a parable, could one but fit the moral to them as neatly as did everyone who discussed Loveday, in whatever terms, fit the due warning on to her tale.

And this moral, for all who ran, but more particularly for those who danced, to read, was as follows:—­

It all came of wanting things above your station.

“How simply does your sex dispose of the problems of life, ma’am,” replied Mr. Constantine to Miss Flora Le Pettit, the heiress of Ignores Manor, when she supplied him with this moral as an epitaph oh the affair.  Miss Le Pettit smiled on him amiably, but arched her already springing brows as well, for though everyone knew Mr. Constantine was reputed clever, there were the gravest doubts about his orthodoxy.

“Problems of life, Mr. Constantine?” she demanded.  “Surely over-fine words to apply to the crazy acts of a village girl deranged in her intellects.”  She would have added:  “And a nameless one at that,” if she had not remembered (what, in truth, she was never in danger of forgetting) that she was a lady talking to a gentleman.