This young woman, now Lady Bowen, once
Milly Jones, had been one of the amusing marvels of New York. A girl
neither rich nor so endowed by nature as to be able to press upon the
world any special claim to consideration as a beauty, her enterprise,
and the daring of her tactics, had been the delight of many a satiric
onlooker. In her schooldays she had ingenuously mapped out her future
career. Other American girls married men with titles, and she intended
to do the same thing. The other little girls laughed, but they liked to
hear her talk. All information regarding such unions as was to be
found in the newspapers and magazines, she collected and studiously
read--sometimes aloud to her companions.
Social paragraphs about royalties, dukes and duchesses, lords and
ladies, court balls and glittering functions, she devoured and learned
by heart. An abominably vulgar little person, she was an interestingly
pertinacious creature, and wrought night and day at acquiring an air of
fashionable elegance, at first naturally laying it on in such manner
as suggested that it should be scraped off with a knife, but with
experience gaining a certain specious knowledge of forms. How
the over-mature child at school had assimilated her uncanny young
worldliness, it would have been less difficult to decide, if possible
sources had been less numerous.
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