But Georgina, the eldest, trifled with her chances, and her twenty-seventh birthday beheld her pouring out her father’s tea in a small furnished house in a street off Portland Place, which the Colonel had hired on his return from India, and which he declared himself unable to maintain another year.

’Directly the season is over I shall give up housekeeping and take a lodging at Bath,’ said Colonel Lorimer.  ’If you don’t like Bath all the year round you can stay with your sisters.’

‘That is the last thing I am likely to do,’ answered Georgina; ’my sisters were barely endurable when they were single and poor.  They are quite intolerable now they are married and rich.  I would sooner live in the monkey-house at the Zoological than stay with either Lucy or Maud.’

‘That’s rank envy,’ retorted her father ’You can’t forgive them for having done so much better than you.’

’I can’t forgive them for having married snobs.  When I marry I shall marry a gentleman.’

‘When!’ echoed the parent, with a sneering laugh.  ’Hadn’t you better say “if"’?

At this period Georgina’s waning good looks were in some measure counterbalanced by the cumulative effects of half a dozen seasons in good society, which had given style to her person, ease to her manners, and sharpness to her tongue.  Nobody in society said sharper or more unpleasant things than Miss Lorimer, and by virtue of this gift she got invited about a great deal more than she might have done had she been distinguished for sweetness of speech and manner.  Georgie Lorimer’s presence at a dinner table gave just that pungent flavour which is like the faint suspicion of garlic in a fricassee or of tarragon in a salad.

Now in this very season, when Colonel Lorimer was inclined to speak of his daughter, as Sainte Beuve wrote of Musset, as a young woman with a very brilliant past, a lucky turn of events gave Georgina a fresh start in life, which may be called a new departure.  Lady Diana Angersthorpe, the belle of the season, took a fancy to her, was charmed with her sharp tongue and acute sense of the ridiculous.  The two became fast friends, and were seen everywhere together.  The best men all flocked round the beauty, and all talked to the beauty’s companion:  and before the season was over, Sir George Kirkbank, who had had half made up his mind to propose to Lady Diana, found himself engaged to that uncommonly jolly girl, Lady Diana’s friend.  Georgina spent August and September with Lady Di, at the Marchioness of Carisbroke’s delightful villa in the Isle of Wight, and Sir George kept his yacht at Cowes all the time, and was in constant attendance upon his fiancee.  It was George and Georgie everywhere.  In October Colonel Lorimer had the profound pleasure of giving away his daughter, before the altar in St. George’s, Hanover Square, and it may be said of him that nothing in his relations with that young lady became him better than his manner of parting with her.