“Exactly.  Do you suppose that will come to anything?” casting a glance towards the further end of the lawn, where Vera Nevill sat in a low basket-chair, under the shadow of a spreading tulip-tree, whilst a slight boyish figure, stretched at her feet, alternately chewed blades of grass and looked up worshippingly into her face.

“That!” following the direction of her companion’s eyes.  “Oh dear, no!  Denis Wilde is too wideawake to be caught, though he is such a boy!  They say she is crazy to get him; everybody else has slipped through her fingers, you see, and he would be better than nothing.  Now we are in the last week in July, I daresay she is getting desperate; but young Wilde knows pretty well what he is about, I expect!”

“He seems to admire her.”

“Oh, yes, I daresay; those large kind of women do get admired; men look upon them as fine animals. I should not care to be admired in that way, would you?”

“No, indeed! it is disgusting,” replied the other, who was fain to conceal the bony corners of her angular figure with a multiplicity of lace ruchings and puffings.

“As to Miss Nevill, she is nothing else.  A most material type; why, her waist must be twenty-two inches round!”

“Quite that, dear,” with sweetness, from the owner of a nineteen-inch article, which two maids struggled with daily in order to reduce it to the required measurement.

“Well, I never could—­between you and me—­see much to admire in her.”

“Neither could I, although, of course, it has been the fashion to rave over her.”

And, with that, these two amiable young women fell at it tooth and nail, and proceeded to cry down their victim’s personal appearance in the most unmeasured and sweeping terms.

After the taking away of a fellow-woman’s character, comes as a natural sequence the condemnation of her face and figure, and it is doubtful which indictment is the most grave in eyes feminine.  Meanwhile the object of all this animadversion sat tranquilly unconscious under her tulip-tree, whilst Denis Wilde, that astute young gentleman, whom they had declared to be too well aware of what he was about to be entrapped into matrimony, was engaged in proposing to her for the fourth time.

“I thought we had settled this subject long ago, Mr. Wilde,” says Vera, tranquilly unfolding her large, black, feather fan—­for it is hot—­and slowly folding it up again.

“It will never be settled for me, Vera; never, so long as you are unmarried.”

“What a dreadful mistake life is!” sighs Vera, wearily, more to herself than to the boy at her feet.  Was anybody ever happy in this world? she began to wonder.

“I know very well,” resumed Denis Wilde, “that I am not good enough for you; but, then, who is?  My prospects, such as they are, are very distant, and your friends, I daresay, expect you to marry well.”

“How often must I tell you that that has nothing to do with it,” cries Vera, impatiently.  “If I loved a beggar, I should marry him.”