His Darling Sin by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

"Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed: / Drink deep, until the habits of the slave, / The sins of emptiness, gossip and spite / And slander, die. Better not be at all / Than not be noble. "

Susan Rodney and her friend dined _tête-à-tête_, in a solemn splendour of butler and silk-stockinged footmen, and talked of music and the Opera. They spent the evening in Lady Perivale's sitting-room on the second floor, a delightful room, with three windows on a level with the tree tops in the square, and containing all her favourite books, her favourite etchings, her favourite piano, and her _marron_ poodle's favourite easy-chair. The poodle was the choicest thing in ornamental dogs, beautiful exceedingly, with silken hair of the delicatest brown, and a face like a Lord Chief Justice, beautiful, but cold-hearted, accepting love, but hardly reciprocating, thinking nothing the world holds too good for him. Susan Rodney called him _marron glacé_.