..
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.
Thus the duchy's drawing-rooms. In the back parlours of the little
country-town shops, where an aristocracy as rigid in its own
respectable--and respectful--way, held its courts of justice, Loveday's
story was referred to with a slight difference. She had become a "young
besom," and her crime was what you might have expected from the bye-blow
of an ear-ringed foreigner, who bowed down to idols instead of the laws
of God and the British Constitution.
In her own little seaport and the farms of the countryside, Loveday
descended lower still--she became a "faggot." Thus from one born to
wield a broom we see how she descended, with the declination in scale of
the chatterboxes, to the broom itself, and from that to the rough
material for it. Which things are a parable, could one but fit the moral
to them as neatly as did everyone who discussed Loveday, in whatever
terms, fit the due warning on to her tale.
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