, and the final result of Mr. MacWalter's taste and Mr.
Smithson's bullion was a palace in the style of the Italian Renaissance,
frescoed ceilings, painted panels, a staircase of sculptured marble, as
beautiful as a dream, a conservatory as exquisite as a jewel casket by
Benvenuto Cellini, a picture gallery which was the admiration of all
London, and of the enlightened foreigner, and of the inquiring American.
This was the house which Lesbia had been brought to see, and through
which she walked with the calmly critical air of a person who had seen
so many palaces that one more or less could make no difference.

In vain did Mr. Smithson peruse her countenance in the hope of seeing
that she was impressed by the splendour of his surroundings, and by the
power of the man who commanded such splendour. Lesbia was as cold as the
Italian sculptor's Reading Girl in an alcove of Mr. Smithson's picture
gallery; and the stockbroker felt very much as Aladdin might have done
if the fair Badroulbadour had shown herself indifferent to the hall of
the jewelled windows, in that magical palace which sprang into being in
a single night.

Lesbia had been impressed by that story of poor Belle Trinder and by
Lady Kirkbank's broad assertion that half the young women in London were
running after Mr. Smithson; and she had made up her mind to treat the
man with supreme scorn. She did not want his houses or his yachts.
Nothing could induce her to marry such a man, she told herself; but her
vanity fed upon the idea of his subjugation, and her pride was gratified
by the sense of her power over him.

The guests were few and choice. There was Mr. Meander, the poet, one of
the leading lights in that new sect which prides itself upon the
cultivation of abstract beauty, and occasionally touches the verge of
concrete ugliness. There were a newspaper man--the editor of a
fashionable journal--and a middle-aged man of letters, playwright,
critic, humourist, a man whose society was in demand everywhere, and who
said sharp things with the most supreme good-nature. The only ladies
whose society Mr. Smithson had deemed worthy the occasion were a
fashionable actress, with her younger sister, the younger a pretty copy
of the elder, both dressed picturesquely in flowing cashmere gowns of
faint sea-green, with old lace fichus, leghorn hats, and a general
limpness and simplicity of style which suited their cast of feature and
delicate colouring. Lesbia wondered to