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.

The air was full of it, the literature of the day, the chatter of afternoon teas, the gossip of the hour.
Before she was fifteen she saw the indiscretion of her childish frankness, and realised that it might easily be detrimental to her ambitions.

She said no more of her plans for her future, and even took the astute tone of carelessly treating as a joke her vulgar little past.
But no titled foreigner appeared upon the horizon without setting her small, but business-like, brain at work.