.'

'Miss Trinder must be very bad style,' said Lesbia, with languid scorn,
'and Mr. Smithson is an execrable person. Did she die?'

'No, my dear, she is alive poor soul!'

'You said she broke her heart.'

'"The heart may break, yet brokenly live on,"' quoted Lady Kirkbank.
'The disappointed young women don't all die. They take to district
visiting, or rational dressing, or china painting, or an ambulance
brigade. The lucky ones marry well-to-do widowers with large families,
and so slip into a comfortable groove by the time they are
five-and-thirty. Poor Belle is still single, still buried in the damp
parsonage, where she paints plates and teacups, and wears out my old
gowns, just as she is wearing out her own life, poor creature!'

'The idea of any one wanting to marry Mr. Smithson,' said Lesbia. 'It
seems too dreadful.'

'A case of real destitution, you think. Wait till you have seen
Smithson's house in Park Lane--his team, his yacht, his orchid houses in
Berkshire.'

Lesbia sighed. Her knowledge of London society was only seven weeks old;
and yet already the day of disenchantment had begun! She was having her
eyes opened to the stern realities of life. A year ago when her
appearance in the great world was still only a dream of the future, she
had pictured to herself the crowd of suitors who would come to woo, and
she had resolved to choose the worthiest.

What would he be like, that worthiest among the wooers, that King Arthur
among her knights?

First and foremost, he would be of rank higher than her own--duke, a
marquis, or one of the first and oldest among earls. Title and lofty
lineage were indispensable. It would be a fall, a failure, a
disappointment, were she to marry a commoner, however distinguished.

The worthy one must be noble, therefore, and of the old nobility. He
must be young, handsome, intellectual. He must stand out from among his
peers by his gifts of mind and person. He must have won distinction in
the arena of politics or diplomacy, arms or letters. He must be
'somebody.'

She had been seven weeks in society, and this modern Arthur had not
appeared. So far as she had been able to discover, there was no such
person. The dukes and marquises were mostly men of advanced years. The
young unmarried nobility were given over to sport, play, and
foolishness. She had heard of only one man who at all corresponded with
her ideal, and he was Lord Hartfield. But Lord Hartfield had given
himself