‘Another new bonnet!’ replied Lesbia.  ’What an infinity of things I seem to be having from Seraphine.  I’m afraid I must owe her a good deal of money.’

This was a vague way of speaking about actual facts.  Lady Lesbia might have spoken with more certainty.  Her wardrobes and old-fashioned hanging closets and chests of drawers in Arlington Street were crammed to overflowing with finery; and then there were all the things that she had grown tired of, or had thought unbecoming, and had given away to Kibble, her own maid, or to Rilboche, who had in a great measure superseded Kibble on all important occasions; for how could a Westmoreland girl know how to dress a young lady for London balls and drawing-rooms?

’If you had only accepted Mr. Smithson it would not matter how much money you owed people,’ said Lady Kirkbank.  ’You had better come down to lunch.  A glass of Heidseck will bring you up to concert pitch.’

Champagne was Lady Kirkbank’s idea of a universal panacea; and she had gradually succeeded in teaching Lesbia to believe in the sovereign power of Heidseck as a restorative for shattered nerves.  At Fellside Lesbia had drunk only water; but then at Fellside she had never known that feeling of exhaustion and prostration which follows days and nights spent in society, the wear and tear of a mind forever on the alert, and brilliant spirits which are more often forced than real.  For her chief stimulant Lesbia had recourse to the teapot; but there were occasions when she found that something more than tea was needed to maintain that indispensable vivacity of manner which Lady Kirkbank called concert pitch.

To-day she allowed herself to be persuaded.  She went down to luncheon, and took a couple of glasses of dry champagne with her cutlet, and, thus restored, was equal to putting on the new bonnet, which was so becoming that her spirits revived as she contemplated the effect in her glass.  So Lady Kirkbank carried her off to the musical matinee, beaming and radiant, having forgotten all about that dark hint of evil glancing at the name of her long dead grandfather.

The duchess was not on view when Lady Kirkbank and her protegee arrived, and a good many people belonging to Georgie’s own particular set were scattered like flowers among those real music-lovers who had come solely to hear the new pianiste.  The music-lovers were mostly dowdy in their attire, and seemed a race apart.  Among them were several young women of the Blessed Damozel school, who wore flowing garments of sap-green or orche, or puffed raiment of Venetian red, and among whom the cartwheel hat, the Elizabethan sleeve, and the Toby frill were conspicuous.

There were very few men except the musical critics in this select assemblage, and Lesbia began to think that it was going to be very dreary.  She had lived in such an atmosphere of masculine adulation while under Lady Kirkbank’s wing that it was a new thing to find herself in a room where there were none to love and very few to praise her.  She felt out in the cold, as it were.  Those ungloved critics, with their shabby coats and dubious shirts, snuffy, smoky, everything they ought not to be, seemed to her a race of barbarians.