an indispensable interview with the dressmaker.  Those mornings at the shops were hardly the least agreeable of Lesbia’s hours.  To a girl brought up in one perpetual tete-a-tete with green hill-sides and silvery watercourses, the West End shops were as gardens of Eden, as Aladdin Caves, as anything, everything that is rapturous and intoxicating.  Lesbia, the clear-headed, the cold-hearted, fairly lost her senses when she went into one of those exquisite shops, where a confusion of brocades and satins lay about in dazzling masses of richest colour, with here and there a bunch of lilies, a cluster of roses, a tortoise-shell fan, an ostrich feather, or a flounce of peerless Point d’Alencon flung carelessly athwart the sheen of a wine-dark velvet or golden-hued satin.

Lady Maulevrier had said Lesbia was to have carte blanche; so Lesbia bought everything she wanted, or fancied she wanted, or that the shop-people thought she must want, or that Lady Kirkbank happened to admire.  The shop-people were so obliging, and so deeply obliged by Lesbia’s patronage.  She was exactly the kind of customer they liked to serve.  She flitted about their showrooms like a beautiful butterfly hovering over a flower-bed—­her eye caught by every novelty.  She never asked the price of anything:  and Lady Kirkbank informed them, in confidence, that she was a great heiress, with a millionaire grandmother who indulged her every whim.  Other high born young ladies, shopping upon fixed allowances, and sorely perplexed to make both ends meet, looked with eyes of envy upon this girl.

And then came the visit to the dressmaker.  It happened after all that Kate Kearney was not intrusted with Lady Lesbia’s frocks.  Miss Kearney was the fashion, and could pick and choose her customers; and as she was a young lady of good business aptitudes, she had a liking for ready money, or at least half-yearly settlements; and, finding that Lady Kirkbank was much more willing to give new orders than to pay old accounts, she had respectfully informed her ladyship that a pressure of business would prevent her executing any further demands from Arlington Street, while the necessity of posting her ledger obliged her to request the favour of an immediate cheque.

The little skirmish—­per letter—­occurred while Lady Kirkbank was at Cannes, and Miss Kearney’s conduct was stigmatised as insolent and ungrateful, since had not she, Lady Kirkbank by the mere fact of her patronage, given this young person her chief claim to fashion?

‘I shall drop her,’ said Georgie, ’and go back to poor old Seraphine, who is worth a cartload of such Irish adventuresses.’

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.  They wrote each other little notes, in which Lady Kirkbank called the dressmaker her cher ange—­her bonne chatte, her chere vielle sotte—­and all manner of affectionate names—­and in which Seraphine occasionally threatened the lady with the dire engines of the law, if money were not forthcoming before Saturday evening.