icies
and prevarications and meannesses! For what? For the glory of an empty
name; and for a fortune that may slip from my dead hand to become the
prey of rogues and adventurers. Who can forecast the future?'

CHAPTER XXV.

CARTE BLANCHE.

Lady Kirkbank's house in Arlington Street was known to half fashionable
London as one of the pleasantest houses in town; and it was known by
repute only, to the other half of fashionable London, as a house whose
threshold was not to be crossed by persons with any regard for their own
dignity and reputation. It was not that Lady Kirkbank had ever actually
forfeited her right to be considered an honest woman and a faithful
wife. People who talked of the lady and her set with a contemptuous
shrug of the shoulders and a dubious elevation of the eyebrows were
ready, when hard pushed in argument, to admit that they knew of no
actual harm in Lady Kirkbank, no overt bad behaviour.

'But--well,' said the punctilious half of society, the Pejinks and
Pernickitys, the Picksomes and Unco-Goods, 'Lady Kirkbank is--Lady
Kirkbank; and I would not allow my girls to visit her, don't you know.'
'Lady Kirkbank is received, certainly,' said a severe dowager. 'She
goes to very good houses. She gets tickets for the Royal enclosure. She
is always at private views, and privileged shows of all kinds; and she
contrives to squeeze herself in at a State ball or a concert about once
in two years; but any one who can consider Lady Kirkbank good style must
have a very curious idea of what a lady ought to be.' 'Lady Kirkbank is
a warm-hearted, nice creature,' said a diplomatist of high rank, and one
of her particular friends, 'but her manners are decidedly--continental!'

About Sir George, society, adverse or friendly, was without strong
opinions. His friends, the men who shot over his Scotch moor, and filled
the spare rooms in his villa at Cannes, and loaded his drag for Sandown
or Epsom, and sponged upon him all the year round, talked of him as 'an
inoffensive old party,' 'a cheery soul,' 'a genial old boy,' and in like
terms of approval. That half of society which did not visit in Arlington
Street, in whose nostrils the semi-aristocratic, semi-artistic,
altogether Bohemian little dinners, the suppers after the play, the
small hours devoted to Nap or Poker, had an odour as of sulphur, the
reek of Tophet--even this half of the great world was fain to admit that
Sir George was harmless. He had never had