The editor, the wit, the poet, the actress, had a language of their own; and Lesbia felt herself out in the cold, unable to catch the ball as it glanced past her, not quick enough to follow the wit that evoked those ripples of silvery laughter from the two fair-haired, pale-faced girls in sea-green cashmere.  She felt as an Englishman may feel who has made himself master of academical French, and who takes up one of Zola’s novels, or goes into artistic society, and finds that there is another French, a complete and copious language, of which he knows not a word.

Lesbia began to think that she had a great deal to learn.  She began to wonder even whether, in the event of her having made rather too free use of Lady Maulevrier’s carte blanche, it might not be well to make a new departure in the art of dressing, and to wear untrimmed cashmere gowns, and rags of limp lace.

After breakfast they all went to look at Mr. Smithson’s picture gallery.  His pictures were, as he had told Lesbia, chiefly of the French school, and there may have been a remote period—­say, in the time of good Queen Charlotte—­when such pictures would hardly have been exhibited to young ladies.  His pictures were Mr. Smithson’s own unaided choice.  Here the individual taste of the man stood revealed.

There were two or three Geromes; and in the place of honour at the end of the gallery there was a grand Delaroche, Anne Boleyn’s last letter to the king, the hapless girl-queen sitting at a table in her gloomy cell in the Tower, a shaft of golden light from the narrow window streaming on the fair, disordered hair, the face bleached with unutterable woe, a sublime image of despair and self-abandonment.

The larger pictures were historical, classic, grand:  but the smaller pictures—­the lively little bits of colour dotted in here and there—­were of that new school which Mr. Smithson affected.  They were of that school which is called Impressionist, in which ballet dancers and jockeys, burlesque actresses, masked balls, and all the humours of the side scenes are represented with the sublime audacity of an art which disdains finish, and relies on chic, fougue, chien, flou, v’lan, the inspiration of the moment.  Lesbia blushed as she looked at the ballet girls, the maskers in their scanty raiment, the demi-mondaines lolling out of their opera boxes, and half out of their gowns, with false smiles and frizzled hair.  And then there came the works of that other school which lavishes the finish of a Meissonier on the most meretricious compositions.  A woman in a velvet gown warming her dainty little feet on a gilded fender, in a boudoir all aglow with colour and lamplight; a cavalier in satin raiment buckling his sword-belt before a Venetian mirror; a pair of lovers kissing in a sunlit corridor; a girl in a hansom cab; a milliner’s shop; and so on, and so on.

Then came the classical subjects of the last new school.  Weak imitations of Alma Tadema.  Nero admiring his mother’s corpse; Claudius interrupting Messalina’s marriage with her lover Silus; Clodius disguised among the women of Caesar’s household; Pyrrha’s grotto.  Lady Kirkbank expatiated upon all the pictures, and generally made unlucky guesses at the subjects of them.  Classical literature was not her strong point.