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certain there was a mystery. Apart from Blake and her immediate matrimonial prospects, Lady Waveryng as the typical aristocrat, the embodiment of that sphere of life for which Elsie had always vainly sighed, afforded fertile subject for reflection. Elsie could not help being impressed by Lady Waveryng's thorough-bred simplicity, her dignity, combined with perfect freedom of manner, her absolute refinement, and all those delicate niceties, and all those indefinable characteristics which make up what is technically termed among the lower classes a "real lady," as distinguished from a fine lady. Lady Waveryng was a "real lady," but she was not in the very least a fine lady—except indeed when she was in her full panoply of diamonds and velvet and Venetian point. Elsie pondered a good deal upon these qualities of Lady Waveryng's. She began to realize how entirely impossible it would have been for Lady Waveryng to do many of the things which she, Elsie, had done so ignorantly and so innocently. She could not imagine Lady Waveryng "on the rampage for beaux," which was Minnie Pryde's inelegant way of expressing a fashion peculiar to some of the faster young ladies of Leichardt's Town, of sauntering about the Botanical Gardens, or up and down Victoria-street, ready to meet the salutations of their admirers with smiling readiness for flirtation. She could not imagine Lady Waveryng holding verandah receptions, or receiving tribute from her various adorers, or allowing herself to be taken home by a young man after a dance like a servant maid keeping company. Elsie grew hot and red as she thought of that walk from Fermoy's, of many other walks, of many other episodes. She was unconsciously learning lessons. She would never again be the Elsie Valliant who had "got engaged" to Jensen, for fun, and broken the young man's heart, the Elsie Valliant who had challenged Blake to a flirtation tournament, and who had been the object of Lord Astar's disrespectful attentions.

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