A rich woman who has never been refused anything, a man who cannot be bought, and a courtship conducted mostly through what neither will admit. Locke wrote to a formula he had made himself - the charming irregular against the respectable - and this is the drawing-room version of it, tighter than the vagabond books and rather more cruel about money. Sixty plates of drawing-room and dinner-party painting, from Sargent to Boldini, keep the fashionable company of this courtship in view.