In truth, a woman of the world in trouble of any kind could not do better than confide in Lady Victoria.  She is so frank and honest that when you talk to her your trouble seems to grow small and your heart big.  She has not a great deal of intellect; but, then, she has a great deal of common sense.  Common sense is, generally speaking, merely a dislike of complications, and a consequent refusal on the part of the individual to discover them.  People of vivid imagination delight in magnifying the difficulties of life by supposing themselves the centre of much scheming, plotting, and cheap fiction.  They cheerfully give their time and their powers to the study of social diplomacy.  It is reserved for people intellectually very high or very low in the scale to lead a really simple life.  The average mind of the world is terribly muddled on most points, and altogether beside itself as regards its individual existence; for a union of much imagination, unbounded vanity, and unfathomable ignorance can never take the place of an intellect, while such a combination cannot fail to destroy the blessed vis inertiae of the primitive fool, who only sees what is visible, instead of evolving the phantoms of an airy unreality from the bottomless abyss of his own so-called consciousness.  Fortunately for humanity, the low-class unimaginative mind predominates in the world, as far as numbers are concerned; and there are enough true intellects among men to leaven the whole.  The middle class of mind is a small class, congregated together chiefly within the boundaries of a very amusing institution calling itself “society.”  These people have scraped and varnished the aforesaid composition of imagination, ignorance, and vanity, into a certain conventional thing which they mendaciously term their “intelligence,” from a Latin verb intelligo, said to mean “I understand.”  It is a poor thing, after all the varnishing.  It is neither hammer nor anvil; it cannot strike, and, if you strike it, dissolution instantly takes place, after which the poor driveller is erroneously said to have “lost his mind,” and is removed to an asylum.  It is curious that the great majority of lunatics should be found in “society.”  Society says that all men of genius are more or less mad; but it is a notable fact that very few men of genius have ever been put in madhouses, whereas the society that calls those men crazy is always finding its way there.  It takes but little to make a lunatic of poor Lady Smith-Tompkins.  Poor thing! you know she is so very “high-strung,” such delicate sensibilities!  She has an idee fixe—­so very sad.  Ah yes! that is it.  She never had an idea before, and now that she has one she cannot get rid of it, and it will kill her in time.