“Oh!  Vera, how can you be so disloyal?  And it’s quite wicked too; almost against Scripture.  Honour the King, you know it says somewhere; of course that means the Prince of Wales too.”

“I can honour him very well without being introduced to him,” said Vera, who, however, let me assure you, was filled with feelings of profound loyalty towards the reigning family.

“But only think what a triumph it would be over those other horrid women who think themselves at the top of the tree!” Mrs. Hazeldine would urge, with a curious conglomeration of ideas, sacred and profane.

But Vera was indifferent to the honour of becoming acquainted with his Royal Highness.

Another of Mrs. Hazeldine’s troubles was that she absolutely refused to be photographed.

“Your portrait might be in every shop window if you chose!” Mrs. Hazeldine would exclaim, despairingly.

“I may be very depraved, Cissy,” Vera would answer, indignantly, “but I have not yet sunk so low as to desire that every draper’s assistant may have the privilege of buying my likeness for a shilling to stick up on his mantelshelf, with a tight-rope dancer on one side, and a burlesque actress on the other!”

“My dear, it is done by every one; and women who are beautiful as you are ought not to mind being admired.”

“But I prefer being admired by my friends only, and by those of my own class.  I have no ambition to expose myself, even in effigy, in a shop window for the edification of street boys and city clerks.”

“Well, you can’t help your name having been in Vanity Fair this week!”

“No, and I only wish I could get hold of the man who put it there!” cried Miss Nevill, viciously; and it is certain that unfortunate literary person would not have relished the interview.

A “beauty” with such strange and unnatural views was, it must be confessed, as much of a trial as a triumph to an anxious chaperon.

There was a certain amount of fashionable routine, the daily treadmill of pleasure, to which, however, Vera submitted readily enough, and even extracted a good deal of enjoyment out of it.  There was the morning saunter into the Row, the afternoons spent at garden parties or “at-homes,” the evenings filled up with dinner parties, to be followed almost invariably by balls lasting late into the night.  All these things repeat themselves year after year:  they are utter weariness to some of us, but to her they were still new, and Vera entered into the daily whirl of the London season with an amount of zest which was almost a surprise to herself.

Just at first there had been a daily terror upon her, that of meeting Sir John Kynaston or his brother; but London is a large place, and you may go out to different houses for many nights running without ever coming across the friend or the foe whom you desire or dread most to encounter.

After a little while, she forgot to glance hurriedly and fearfully around her every time she entered a ball-room, or to look up shudderingly each time the door was opened and a fresh guest announced at a dinner-party.  She never met either of them, nor did the name of Kynaston ever strike upon her ear.