rels. It had been stated openly in the Morning Post that that young lady had been the most admired among the beautiful at one of Miss Dunstable's celebrated soirées, and then she was heard of as gracing the drawing-room at Mrs. Proudie's conversazione.
Of Miss Dunstable herself Lady Lufton was not able openly to allege any evil. She was acquainted, Lady Lufton knew, with very many people of the right sort, and was the dear friend of Lady Lufton's highly conservative and not very distant neighbors, the Greshams. But then she was also acquainted with so many people of the bad sort. Indeed, she was intimate with every body, from the Duke of Omnium to old Dowager Lady Goodygaffer, who had represented all the cardinal virtues for the last quarter of a century. She smiled with equal sweetness on treacle and on brimstone; was quite at home at Exeter Hall, having been consulted—so the world said, probably not with exact truth—as to the selection of more than one disagreeably Low-Church bishop; and was not less frequent in her attendance at the ecclesiastical doings of a certain terrible prelate in the midland counties, who was supposed to favor stoles and vespers, and to have no proper Protestant hatred for auricular confession and fish on Fridays. Lady Lufton, who was very stanch, did not like this, and would say of Miss Dunstable that it was impossible to serve both God and Mammon.
But Mrs. Proudie was much more objectionable to her. Seeing how sharp was the feud between the Proudies and the Grantlys down in Barsetshire, how absolutely unable they had always been to carry a decent face toward each other in Church matters, how they headed two parties in the diocese, which were, when brought together, as oil and vinegar, in which battles the whole Lufton influence had always been brought to bear on the Grantly side—seeing all this, I say, Lady Lufton was surprised to hear that Griselda had been taken to Mrs. Proudie's evening exhibition. "Had the archdeacon been consulted about it," she said to herself, "this would never have happened." But there she was wrong, for in matters concerning his daughter's introduction to the world the archdeacon never interfered.
On the whole, I am inclined to think that Mrs. Grantly understood the world better than did Lady Lufton. In her heart of hearts Mrs. Grantly hated Mrs. Proudie—that
