After this breakfast in Park Lane Lady Lesbia and her admirer met daily.  He went to all her parties; he sat out waltzes with her, in conservatories, and on staircases; for Horace Smithson was much too shrewd a man too enter himself in the race for dancing men, handicapped by his forty years and his fourteen stone.  He contrived to amuse Lesbia by his conversation, which was essentially mundane, depreciating people whom all the rest of the world admired, or pretended to admire, telling her of the secret springs by which the society she saw around her was moved.  He was judicious in his revelations of hidden evil, and careful to say nothing which should offend Lady Lesbia’s modesty; yet he contrived in a very short time to teach her that the world in which she lived was an utterly corrupt world, whose high priest was Satan; that all lofty aspirations and noble sentiments were out of place in society; and that the worst among the people she met were the people who laid any claim to being better than their neighbours.

‘That’s why I adore Lady Kirkbank,’ he said, confidentially.  ’The dear soul never pretends to be any better than the rest of us.  She gambles, and we all know she gambles; she pegs, and we all know she pegs; and she makes rather a boast of being up to her eyes in debt.  No humbug about dear old Georgie.’

Lesbia had seen enough, of her chaperon by this time to know that Mr. Smithson’s description of the lady was correct, and, this being so, she supposed that the facts and traits of character which he told her about in other people were also true.  She thus adopted the Smithsonian, or fashionable-pessimist view of society in general, and resigned herself to the idea that the world was a very wicked world, as well as a very pleasant world, that the wickedest people were generally the pleasantest, and that it did not much matter.

The fact that Mr. Smithson was at Lesbia Haselden’s feet was obvious to everybody.

Lesbia, who had at first treated him with supreme hauteur, had grown more civil as she began to understand the place he held in the world, and how much social influence goes along with unlimited wealth.  She was civil, but she had quite made up her mind that nothing could ever induce her to become Horace Smithson’s wife.  That offer which had hung fire in the case of poor Belle Trinder, was not too long delayed on this occasion.  Mr. Smithson called in Arlington Street about ten days after the breakfast in Park Lane, before luncheon, and before Lady Kirkbank had left her room.  He brought tickets for a matinee d’invitation in Belgrave Square, at which a new and wonderful Russian pianiste was to make a kind of semi-official debut, before an audience of critics and distinguished amateurs, and the elect of the musical world.  They wore tickets which money could not buy, and were thus a meet offering for Lady Lesbia, and a plausible excuse for an early call.

Mr. Smithson succeeded in seeing Lesbia alone, and then and there, with very little circumlocution, asked her to be his wife.