‘You are right,’ answered Lady Kirkbank, ’there is an appalling sameness in men:  only it is odd you should find it out so soon.  I never discovered it till I was an old woman.  How I envy Cleopatra her Caesar and her Antony.  No mistaking one of those for the other.  Mary Stuart too, what marked varieties of character she had an opportunity of studying in Rizzio and Chastelard, Darnley and Bothwell.  Ah, child, that is what it is to live.’

‘Mary is very interesting,’ sighed Lesbia; ’but I fear she was not a correct person.’

’My love, what correct person ever is interesting?  History draws a misty halo round a sinner of that kind, till one almost believes her a saint.  I think Mary Stuart, Froude’s Mary, simply perfect.’

Lesbia had begun by blushing at Lady Kirkbank’s opinions; but she was now used to the audacity of the lady’s sentiments, and the almost infantile candour with which she gave utterance to them.  Lady Kirkbank liked to make her friends laugh.  It was all she could do now in order to be admired.  And there is nothing like audacity for making people laugh nowadays.  Lady Kirkbank was a close student of all those delightful books of French memoirs which bring the tittle-tattle of the Regency and the scandals of Louis the Fifteenth’s reign so vividly before us:  and she had unconsciously founded her manners and her ways of thinking and talking upon that easy-going but elegant age.  She did not want to seem better than women who had been so altogether charming.  She fortified the frivolity of historical Parisian manners by a dash of the British sporting character.  She drove, shot, jumped over five-barred gates, contrived on the verge of seventy to be as active us a young woman; and she flattered herself that the mixture of wit, audacity, sport, and good-nature was full of fascination.

However this might be, it is certain that a good many people liked her, chiefly perhaps because she was good-natured, and a little on account of that admirable cook.

To Lesbia, who had been weary to loathing of her old life amidst the hills and waterfalls of Westmoreland, this new life was one perpetual round of pleasure.  She flung herself with all her heart and mind into the amusement of the moment; she knew neither weariness nor satiety.  To ride in the park in the morning, to go to a luncheon party, a garden party, to drive in the park for half an hour after the garden party, to rush home and dress for the fourth or fifth time, and then off to a dinner, and from dinner to drum, and from drum to big ball, at which rumour said the Prince and Princess were to be present:  and so, from eleven o’clock in the morning till four or five o’clock next morning, the giddy whirl went on:  and every hour was so occupied by pleasure engagements that it was difficult to squeeze in an occasional morning for shopping—­necessary to go to the shops sometimes, or one would not know how many things one really wants—­or for