“’Twould be an awful battle,” said Roxholm, “between a will like hers and such a brute as he, should her choice not be his.”

“Ay, he is a great blackguard,” commented Twemlow, coolly enough.  “England scarcely holds a bigger than Jeoffry Wildairs, and he has had the building of her, body and soul.”

’Twas not alone my Lord Twemlow who talked of her, but almost every other person, so it seemed.  Oftenest she was railed at and condemned, the more especially if there were women in the party discussing her; but ’twas to be marked that at such times as men were congregated and talked of her faults and beauties, more was said of her charms than her sins.  They fell into relating their stories of her, even the soberest of them, as if with a sense of humour in them, as indeed the point of such anecdotes was generally humorous because of a certain piquant boldness and lawless wild spirit shown in them.  The story of the Chaplain, Roxholm heard again, and many others as fantastic.  The retorts of this young female Ishmael upon her detractors and assailers, on such rare occasions as she encountered them, were full of a wit so biting and so keen that they were more than any dared to face when it could be avoided.  But she was so bold and ingenious, and so ready with devices, that few could escape her.  Her companionship with her father’s cronies had given her a curious knowledge of the adventures which took place in three counties, at least, and her brain was so alert and her memory so unusual that she was enabled to confront an enemy with such adroitly arranged circumstantial evidence that more than one poor beauty would far rather have faced a loaded cannon than found herself within the immediate neighbourhood of the mocking and flashing eyes.  Her meeting in the mercer’s shop with the fair “Willow Wand,” Lady Maddon, had been so full of spirited and pungent truth as to drive her ladyship back to London after her two hours’ fainting fits were over.

“Look you, my lady,” she had ended, in her clear, rich girl-voice—­and to every word she uttered the mercer and his shopmen and boys had stood listening behind their counters or hid round bales of goods, all grinning as they listened—­“I know all your secrets as I know the secrets of other fine ladies.  I know and laugh at them because they show you to be such fools.  They are but fine jokes to me.  My morals do not teach me to pray for you or blame you.  Your tricks are your own business, not another woman’s, and I would have told none of them—­not one—­if you had not lied about me.  I am not a woman in two things:  I wear breeches and I know how to keep my mouth shut as well as if ’twere padlocked; but you lied about me when you told the story of young Lockett and me.  ’Twas a damned lie, my lady.  Had it been true none would have known of it, and he must have been a finer man—­with more beauty and more wit.  But as for the thing I tell you of Sir James—­and your meeting at——­”