‘Poor things!’ sighed Lesbia, gazing admiringly at the handle of her last new sunshade.

‘Belle used to talk of what she would do for them all,’ pursued Lady Kirkbank.  ’Father should go every year to the villa at Monte Carlo; mother and the girls should have a month in Park Lane every season, and their autumn holiday at one of Mr. Smithson’s country houses.  I knew the world well enough to be sure that this kind of thing would never answer with a man like Smithson.  It is only one man in a thousand—­the modern Arthur, the modern Quixote—­who will marry a whole family.  I told Belle as much, but she laughed.  She felt so secure of her power over the man.  “He will do anything I ask him,” she said.’

‘Miss Trinder must be an extraordinary young person,’ observed Lesbia, scornfully.  ‘The man had not proposed, had he?’

’No; the actual proposal hung fire, but Belle thought it was a settled thing all the same.  Everybody talked to her as if she were engaged to Smithson, and those poor, ignorant vicarage girls used to write her long letters of congratulation, envying her good fortune, speculating, about what she would do when she was married.  The girl was too open and candid for London society—­talked too much, “gave the view before she was sure of her fox,” Sir George said.  All this silly talk came to Smithson’s ears, and one morning we read in the Post that Mr. Smithson had started the day before for Algiers, where he was to stay at the house of the English Consul, and hunt lions.  We waited all day, hoping for some letter of explanation, some friendly farewell which would mean a revoir.  But there was nothing, and then poor Belle gave way altogether.  She shut herself up in her room, and went out of one hysterical fit into another.  I never heard a girl sob so terribly.  She was not fit to be seen for a week, and then she went home to her father’s parsonage in the flat swampy country on the borders of Suffolk, and eat her heart, as Byron calls it.  And the worst of it was that she had no actual justification for considering herself jilted.  She had talked, and other people had talked, and among them they had settled the business.  But Smithson had said hardly anything.  He had only flirted to his heart’s content, and had spent a few hundreds upon flowers, gloves, fans, and opera tickets, which perhaps would not have been accepted by a girl with a strong sense of her own dignity.’

‘I should think not, indeed,’ interjected Lesbia.

‘But which poor Belle was only too delighted to get.’

‘Miss Trinder must be very bad style,’ said Lesbia, with languid scorn, ‘and Mr. Smithson is an execrable person.  Did she die?’

‘No, my dear, she is alive poor soul!’

‘You said she broke her heart.’

‘"The heart may break, yet brokenly live on,"’ quoted Lady Kirkbank.  ’The disappointed young women don’t all die.  They take to district visiting, or rational dressing, or china painting, or an ambulance brigade.  The lucky ones marry well-to-do widowers with large families, and so slip into a comfortable groove by the time they are five-and-thirty.  Poor Belle is still single, still buried in the damp parsonage, where she paints plates and teacups, and wears out my old gowns, just as she is wearing out her own life, poor creature!’