The White Riband

That was how they spoke of her story in the duchy's drawing-rooms; for what had Loveday been, at the most charitable count, but a young female-less humanly speaking, even a young person? And what was the spring of her mad crimes but folly, mere weak, feminine folly? Even an improper motive-one of those over-powering passions one reads about rather surreptitiously in the delightful works of that dear, naughty, departed Lord Byron-would have been somehow more ... more ... satisfactory. One could only whisper such a sentiment, but it stirred in many a feminine breast when Loveday's story set the ripples of reprobation circling some twenty miles, till the incomparably bigger pebble of the Prince of Wales' nuptials made correspondingly greater waves, even though they took a month or so to spread all its fascinating details so far from the Metropolis. What, after all, as a topic of conversation, was Loveday's ill-gotten gaud compared with the thrill of the new Alexandra jacket with its pegtop sleeves? One should hold a right proportion in all things.