‘But—­well,’ said the punctilious half of society, the Pejinks and Pernickitys, the Picksomes and Unco-Goods, ’Lady Kirkbank is—­Lady Kirkbank; and I would not allow my girls to visit her, don’t you know.’  ‘Lady Kirkbank is received, certainly,’ said a severe dowager.  ’She goes to very good houses.  She gets tickets for the Royal enclosure.  She is always at private views, and privileged shows of all kinds; and she contrives to squeeze herself in at a State ball or a concert about once in two years; but any one who can consider Lady Kirkbank good style must have a very curious idea of what a lady ought to be.’  ’Lady Kirkbank is a warm-hearted, nice creature,’ said a diplomatist of high rank, and one of her particular friends, ‘but her manners are decidedly—­continental!’

About Sir George, society, adverse or friendly, was without strong opinions.  His friends, the men who shot over his Scotch moor, and filled the spare rooms in his villa at Cannes, and loaded his drag for Sandown or Epsom, and sponged upon him all the year round, talked of him as ’an inoffensive old party,’ ‘a cheery soul,’ ‘a genial old boy,’ and in like terms of approval.  That half of society which did not visit in Arlington Street, in whose nostrils the semi-aristocratic, semi-artistic, altogether Bohemian little dinners, the suppers after the play, the small hours devoted to Nap or Poker, had an odour as of sulphur, the reek of Tophet—­even this half of the great world was fain to admit that Sir George was harmless.  He had never had an idea beyond the realms of sport; he had never had a will of his own outside his stable.  To shoot pigeons at Hurlington or Monaco, to keep half a dozen leather-platers, and attend every race from the Craven to the Leger, to hunt four days a week, when he was allowed to spend a winter in England, and to saunter and sleep away all the hours which could not be given to sport, comprised Sir George’s idea of existence.  He had never troubled himself to consider whether there might not possibly be a better way of getting rid of one’s life.  He was as God had made him, and was perfectly satisfied with himself and the universe; save at such times as when a favourite horse went lame, or his banker wrote to tell him that his account was overdrawn.

Sir George had no children; he had never had a serious care in his life.  He never thought, he never read.  Lady Kirkbank declared that she had never seen him with a book in his hands since their marriage.

‘I don’t believe he would know at which end to begin,’ she said.

What was the specific charge which the very particular people brought against Lady Kirkbank?  Such charges rarely are specific.  The idea that the lady belonged to the fast and furious section of society, the Bohemia of the upper ten, was an idea in the air.  Everybody knew it.  No one could quite adequately explain it.