Mrs. Chepstow was a great beauty in decline.  Her day of glory had been fairly long, but now it seemed to be over.  She was past forty.  She said she was thirty-eight, but she was over forty.  Goodness, some say, keeps women fresh.  Mrs. Chepstow had tried a great many means of keeping fresh, but she had omitted that.  The step between aestheticism and asceticism was one which she had never taken, though she had taken many steps, some of them, unfortunately, false ones.  She had been a well-born girl, the daughter of aristocratic but impecunious and extravagant parents.  Her father, Everard Page, a son of Lord Cheam, had been very much at home in the Bankruptcy Court.  Her mother, too, was reckless about money, saying, whenever it was mentioned, “Money is given us to spend, not to hoard.”  So little did she hoard it, that eventually her husband published a notice in the principal papers, stating that he would not be responsible for her debts.  It was a very long time since he had been responsible for his own.  Still, there was a certain dignity in the announcement, as of an honest man frankly declaring his position.

Mrs. Chepstow’s life was very possibly influenced by her parents’ pecuniary troubles.  When she was young she learnt to be frightened of poverty.  She had known what it was to be “sold up” twice before she was twenty; and this probably led her to prefer the alternative of being sold.  At any rate, when she was in her twenty-first year, sold she was to Mr. Wodehouse Chepstow, a rich brewer, to whom she had not even taken a fancy; and as Mrs. Chepstow she made a great fame in London society as a beauty.  She was christened Bella Donna.  She was photographed, written about, worshipped by important people, until her celebrity spread far over the world, as the celebrity even of a woman who is only beautiful and who does nothing can spread in the era of the paragraph.

And then presently she was the heroine of a great divorce case.

Mr. Chepstow, forgetting that among the duties required of the modern husband is the faculty of turning a blind eye upon the passing fancies of a lovely and a generally admired wife, suddenly proclaimed some ugly truths, and completely ruined Mrs. Chepstow’s reputation.  He won his case.  He got heavy damages out of a well-known, married man.  The married man’s wife was forced to divorce him.  And Mrs. Chepstow was socially “done for.”  Then began the new period of her life, a period utterly different from all that had preceded it.

She was at this time only twenty-six, and in the zenith of her beauty.  Every one supposed that the man to whom she owed her ruin would marry her as soon as it was possible.  Unfortunately, he died before the decree nisi was made absolute.  Mrs. Chepstow’s future had been committed to the Fates, and they had turned down their thumbs.

Notorious, lovely, now badly off, still young, she was left to shift for herself in the world.