The one person among them a little out of tune with most, was Lady Grace Halley.  Nataly’s provincial gentlewoman’s traditions of the manners indicating conduct, reproved unwonted licences assumed by Lady Grace; who, in allusion to Hymen’s weaving of a cousinship between the earldom of Southweare and that of Cantor, of which Mr. Sowerby sprang, set her mouth and fan at work to delineate total distinctions, as it were from the egg to the empyrean.  Her stature was rather short, all of it conversational, at the eyebrows, the shoulders, the finger-tips, the twisting shape; a ballerina’s expressiveness; and her tongue dashed half sentences through and among these hieroglyphs, loosely and funnily candid.  Anybody might hear that she had gone gambling into the City, and that she had got herself into a mess, and that by great good luck she had come across Victor Radnor, who, with two turns of the wrist, had plucked her out of the mire, the miraculous man!  And she had vowed to him, never again to run doing the like without his approval.

The cause of her having done it, was related with the accompaniments; brows twitching, flitting smiles, shrugs, pouts, shifts of posture:  she was married to a centaur; out of the saddle a man of wood, ’an excellent man.’  For the not colloquial do not commit themselves.  But one wants a little animation in a husband.  She called on bell-motion of the head to toll forth the utter nightcap negative.  He had not any:  out of the saddle, he was asleep:—­’next door to the Last Trump,’ Colney Durance assisted her to describe the soundest of sleep in a husband, after wooing her to unbosom herself.  She was awake to his guileful arts, and sailed along with him, hailing his phrases, if he shot a good one; prankishly exposing a flexible nature, that took its holiday thus in a grinding world, among maskers, to the horrification of the prim.  So to refresh ourselves, by having publicly a hip-bath in the truth while we shock our hearers enough to be discredited for what we reveal, was a dexterous merry twist, amusing to her; but it was less a cynical malice than her nature that she indulged, ‘A woman must have some excitement.’  The most innocent appeared to her the Stock Exchange.  The opinions of husbands who are not summoned to pay are hardly important; they vary.

Colney helped her now and then to step the trifle beyond her stride, but if he was humorous, she forgave; and if together they appalled the decorous, it was great gain.  Her supple person, pretty lips, the style she had, gave a pass to the wondrous confidings, which were for masculine ears, whatever the sex.  Nataly might share in them, but women did not lead her to expansiveness; or not the women of the contracted class:  Miss Graves, Mrs. Cormyn, and others at the Radnor Concerts.  She had a special consideration for Mademoiselle de Seilles, owing to her exquisite French, as she said; and she may have liked it, but it was the young Frenchwoman’s air of high breeding