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Updated: June 14, 2025
Forty years ago Lady Kirkbank's long ringlets had been darkest glossiest brown, to-day she wore a tousled fringe of bright yellow, piquantly contrasting with Vandyke brown eyebrows. It took Lady Maulevrier some moments to get over the shock. She drew a chair to the fire and established her friend in it, and then, with a little gasp, she said: 'I am charmed to see you again, Georgie!
So to Madame Seraphine, of Clanricarde Place, Lady Lesbia was taken as a lamb to the slaughter-house. Seraphine had made Lady Kirkbank's clothes, off and on for the last thirty years. Seraphine and Georgia had grown old together. Lady Kirkbank was always dropping Seraphine and taking her up again, quarrelling and making friends with her.
But in London the very atmosphere was charged with hurry and agitation; the freshness was gone from the verdure of the parks; the glory of the rhododendrons had faded; the Green Park below Lady Kirkbank's mansion was baked and rusty; the towers of the Houses of Parliament yonder were dimly seen in a mist of heat.
'A nice snug little party, exclaimed that charming optimist, Lady Kirkbank. 'I hate a crowd on a drag. The way some of the members of the Four-in-hand Club load their coaches on parade reminds me of a Beanfeast! They found Lady Kirkbank's footman and one of Mr. Smithson's grooms waiting in the hall of the opera house.
They had both risen at Lady Kirkbank's approach, and were standing side by side, confronting her. Lesbia had shrunk from the idea of poverty with John Hammond; yet, for this man's sake, she was ready to face penury, ruin, disgrace, anything.
Seraphine was an artist in complexions, and it was she who provided her middle-aged and elderly customers with the lilies and roses of youth. Lady Kirkbank's town complexion was superintended by Seraphine, sometimes even manipulated by those harpy-like claws. The eyebrows of which Lesbia complained were only eyebrows de province eyebrows de voyage.
He devotes himself exclusively to politics; and he is not in Lady Kirkbank's set. A terrible disappointment to me, Mary! 'It is a pity, said Mary. 'Lesbia is so lovely. If Lord Hartfield were fancy-free he ought to fall in love with her, could they but meet. I thought that in London all fashionable people knew each other, and were continually meeting. 'It used to be so in my day, Mary.
Yet the expenditure of Lady Maulevrier's existence, spent always on the same spot, must be as nothing to the money spent in such a life as Lady Kirkbank's, which involved the keeping up of three or four houses, and costly journeys to and fro, and incessant change of attire. No doubt Lady Maulevrier had saved money; yes, she must have saved thousands during her long seclusion, Lesbia argued.
Lady Kirkbank's attendant, a Frenchwoman of five-and-thirty, who looked as if she had graduated at Mabille, was to occupy the back seat of the landau. Lady Mary looked after her sister longingly, as the carriage drove down the hill.
They were loyal enough in keeping their engagements at the dinner table, for Lady Kirkbank's cook was one of the best in London; and the invited guests were rarely missing at the little suppers after opera or play: but Georgia's box was no longer crowded with men who dropped in between the acts to see what she thought of the singer or the piece, and her swains were no longer contented to sit behind her chair all the evening, seeing an empty corner of the stage across Georgia's ivory shoulder, and hearing the voices of invisible actors in the brief pauses of Georgie's subdued babble.
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