What is the story?  Well, we must admit that we have a faint suspicion that Ouida has told it to us before.  Lord Guilderoy, ’whose name was as old as the days of Knut,’ falls madly in love, or fancies that he falls madly in love, with a rustic Perdita, a provincial Artemis who has ’a Gainsborough face, with wide-opened questioning eyes and tumbled auburn hair.’  She is poor but well-born, being the only child of Mr. Vernon of Llanarth, a curious recluse, who is half a pedant and half Don Quixote.  Guilderoy marries her and, tiring of her shyness, her lack of power to express herself, her want of knowledge of fashionable life, returns to an old passion for a wonderful creature called the Duchess of Soria.  Lady Guilderoy becomes ice; the Duchess becomes fire; at the end of the book Guilderoy is a pitiable object.  He has to submit to be forgiven by one woman, and to endure to be forgotten by the other.  He is thoroughly weak, thoroughly worthless, and the most fascinating person in the whole story.  Then there is his sister Lady Sunbury, who is very anxious for Guilderoy to marry, and is quite determined to hate his wife.  She is really a capital sketch.  Ouida describes her as ’one of those admirably virtuous women who are more likely to turn men away from the paths of virtue than the wickedest of sirens.’  She irritates herself, alienates her children, and infuriates her husband: 

’You are perfectly right; I know you are always right; I admit you are; but it is just that which makes you so damnably odious!’ said Lord Sunbury once, in a burst of rage, in his town house, speaking in such stentorian tones that the people passing up Grosvenor Street looked up at his open windows, and a crossing-sweeper said to a match- seller, ‘My eye! ain’t he giving it to the old gal like blazes.’

The noblest character in the book is Lord Aubrey.  As he is not a genius he, naturally, behaves admirably on every occasion.  He begins by pitying the neglected Lady Guilderoy, and ends by loving her, but he makes the great renunciation with considerable effect, and, having induced Lady Guilderoy to receive back her husband, he accepts ’a distant and arduous Viceroyalty.’  He is Ouida’s ideal of the true politician, for Ouida has apparently taken to the study of English politics.  A great deal of her book is devoted to political disquisitions.  She believes that the proper rulers of a country like ours are the aristocrats.  Oligarchy has great fascinations for her.  She thinks meanly of the people and adores the House of Lords and Lord Salisbury.  Here are some of her views.  We will not call them ideas: