‘But if you lose your character, my lady?’ said Reginald.

‘Then I must look to the General to restore it.’

General Ople immediately bowed his head over Lady Camper’s fingers.

‘An odd thing to happen to a woman of forty-one!’ she said to her great people, and they submitted with the best grace in the world, while the General’s ears tingled till he felt younger than Reginald.  This, his reflections ran, or it would be more correct to say waltzed, this is the result of painting!—­that you can believe a woman to be any age when her cheeks are tinted!

As for Lady Camper, she had been floated accidentally over the ridicule of the bruit of a marriage at a time of life as terrible to her as her fiction of seventy had been to General Ople; she resigned herself to let things go with the tide.  She had not been blissful in her first marriage, she had abandoned the chase of an ideal man, and she had found one who was tunable so as not to offend her ears, likely ever to be a fund of amusement for her humour, good, impressible, and above all, very picturesque.  There is the secret of her, and of how it came to pass that a simple man and a complex woman fell to union after the strangest division.

     ETEXT editor’s bookmarks: 

     Can believe a woman to be any age when her cheeks are tinted
     Modest are the most easily intoxicated when they sip at vanity
     Nature is not of necessity always roaring
     Only to be described in the tongue of auctioneers
     Respected the vegetable yet more than he esteemed the flower
     She seems honest, and that is the most we can hope of girls
     Spare me that word “female” as long as you live
     The mildness of assured dictatorship
     When we see our veterans tottering to their fall

THE TALE OF CHLOE AN EPISODE IN THE HISTORY OF BEAU BEAMISH

By George Meredith

’Fair Chloe, we toasted of old,
As the Queen of our festival meeting;
Now Chloe is lifeless and cold;
You must go to the grave for her greeting. 
Her beauty and talents were framed
To enkindle the proudest to win her;
Then let not the mem’ry be blamed
Of the purest that e’er was a sinner!’

Captain Chanter’s Collection.

CHAPTER I

A proper tenderness for the Peerage will continue to pass current the illustrious gentleman who was inflamed by Cupid’s darts to espouse the milkmaid, or dairymaid, under his ballad title of Duke of Dewlap:  nor was it the smallest of the services rendered him by Beau Beamish, that he clapped the name upon her rustic Grace, the young duchess, the very first day of her arrival at the Wells.  This happy inspiration of a wit never failing at a pinch has rescued one of our princeliest houses from the assaults of the vulgar, who are ever too rejoiced to bespatter and disfigure a brilliant coat-of-arms; insomuch that the ballad, to which we are indebted for the narrative of the meeting and marriage of the ducal pair, speaks of Dewlap in good faith—­