‘That will be soon enough,’ answered the Countess.  ’It will take you as long to get rid of those odious freckles.  And no doubt by that time Lesbia will have made a brilliant marriage.’

And now on this rainy July morning these two girls, neither of whom had any serious employment for her life, or any serious purpose in living, wasted the hours, each in her own fashion.

Lesbia reclined upon a cushioned seat in the deep embrasure of a Tudor window, her pose perfection—­it was one of many such attitudes which Mademoiselle had taught her, and which by assiduous training had become a second nature.  Poor Mademoiselle, having finished her mission and taught Lesbia all she could teach, had now departed to a new and far less luxurious situation in a finishing school at Passy; but Fraeulein Mueller was still retained, as watch-dog and duenna.

Lesbia’s pale blue morning gown harmonised exquisitely with a complexion of lilies and roses, violet eyes, and golden-brown hair.  Her features were distinguished by that perfect chiselling which gave such a haughty grace to her grandmother’s countenance, even at sixty-seven years of age—­a loveliness which, like the sculptured marble it resembles, is unalterable by time.  Lesbia was reading Keats.  It was her habit to read the poets, carefully and deliberately, taking up one at a time, and duly laying a volume aside when she found herself mistress of its contents.  She had no passion for poetry, but it was an elegant leisurely kind of reading which suited her languid temperament.  Moreover, her grandmother had told her that an easy familiarity with the great poets is of all knowledge that which best qualifies a woman to shine in conversation, without offending the superior sex by any assumption of scholarship.

Mary was a very different class of reader; capricious, omniverous, tearing out the hearts of books, roaming from flower to flower in the fields of literature, loving old and new, romance and reality, novels, travels, plays, poetry, and never dwelling long on any one theme.  Perhaps if Mary had lived in the bosom of a particularly sympathetic family she might have been reckoned almost a genius, so much of poetry and originality was there in her free unconventional character; but hitherto it had been Mary’s mission in life to be snubbed, whereby she had acquired a very poor opinion of her own talents.

‘Oh,’ she cried with a desperate yawn, while Lesbia smiled her languid smile over Endymion, ’how I wished something would happen—­anything to stir us out of this statuesque, sleeping-beauty state of being.  I verily believe the spiders are all asleep in the ivy, and the mice behind the wainscot, and the horses in the stable.’

‘What could happen?’ asked Lesbia, with a gentle elevation of pencilled brows.  ’Are not these lovely lines—­

    “And coverlids gold-tinted like the peach,
    Or ripe October’s faded marigolds,
    Fell sleek about him in a thousand folds.”