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Updated: June 14, 2025
Lesbia blushed, and confessed that the Duchess of Lostwithiel was one of those select few who were not on Lady Kirkbank's visiting list. 'There are people Lady Kirkbank cannot get on with, she said. 'Perhaps she will hardly like to go to the duchess's, as she does not visit her. 'Oh, but this affair counts for nothing. We go to hear Metzikoff, not to bow down to the duchess.
The yacht had only got back to Cowes in time for the ball, and all had been hurry and excitement while the ladies dressed and crossed to the club, the spray dashing over their opera mantles, poor Lady Kirkbank's complexion yellow with mal de mer, in spite of a double coating of Blanc de Fedora, the last fashionable cosmetic.
She expected Lesbia to confide in her, to announce herself blushingly as the betrothed of one of the richest commoners in England. But Lesbia sat gazing dreamily across the flowers in the balcony at the house over the way, and said never a word; so Lady Kirkbank's curiosity burst into speech. 'Well, my dear, has he proposed?
'I'm afraid Lady Kirkbank's is rather a rowdy set, answered Lesbia, coolly; 'and I sometimes feel as if I had thrown myself away. We go almost everywhere at least, there are only just a few houses to which we are not asked. But those few make all the difference. It is so humiliating to feel that one is not in quite the best society.
The eyebrows, too, had given in, and narrow lines of Vandyke brown meandered down Lady Kirkbank's cheeks. The frizzy hair had gone altogether wrong, and had a wild look, suggestive of the witches in Macbeth, and the scraggy neck and poor old shoulders showed every year of their age in the ghastly morning light.
One afternoon in May, at that hour when Hyde Park is fullest, and the carriages move slowly in triple rank along the Lady's Mile, and the mounted constables jog up and down with a business-like air which sets every one on the alert for the advent of the Princess of Wales, just at that hour when Lesbia sat in Lady Kirkbank's barouche, and distributed gracious bows and enthralling smiles to her numerous acquaintance, Mary rode slowly down the Fell, after a rambling ride on the safest and most venerable of mountain ponies.
Lesbia, who, in spite of her affectations, was still fresh enough to be charmed with fine acting and a powerful play, was enthralled by the stage, so wrapt in the scene that she was quite unaware of her brother's presence in a stall just below Lady Kirkbank's box. He too had a stall at the Gaiety. He had come in very late, when the play was half over.
I think if I had been Lesbia's guide in society her first season would have counted for more than it is likely to count for under Lady Kirkbank's management. I should have awakened Lesbia from the dream of dress and dancing the mere butterfly life of a girl who never looks beyond the present moment. But now go and give orders about your packing, Mary.
Her nature was shallow enough to be passing fickle; the passion which she had taken for love was little more than a girl's fancy; but the man who had power to awaken that fancy as John Hammond had done had not yet appeared in Lady Kirkbank's circle. 'What a cold-hearted creature you must be, said Georgie. 'You don't seem to admire any of my favourite men.
He had promised her that she should be the richer by a neat little bundle of fat and flourishing railway stock when his happiness was secured, and he was not going to break his promise. But he did not mean to give George and Georgie free quarters at Rood Hall, or at Cowes, or Deauville; and he meant to withdraw his wife altogether from Lady Kirkbank's pinchbeck set.
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