lass. So
Lady Kirkbank carried her off to the musical _matinee_, beaming and
radiant, having forgotten all about that dark hint of evil glancing at
the name of her long dead grandfather.

The duchess was not on view when Lady Kirkbank and her _protegee_
arrived, and a good many people belonging to Georgie's own particular
set were scattered like flowers among those real music-lovers who had
come solely to hear the new pianiste. The music-lovers were mostly dowdy
in their attire, and seemed a race apart. Among them were several young
women of the Blessed Damozel school, who wore flowing garments of
sap-green or orche, or puffed raiment of Venetian red, and among whom
the cartwheel hat, the Elizabethan sleeve, and the Toby frill were
conspicuous.

There were very few men except the musical critics in this select
assemblage, and Lesbia began to think that it was going to be very
dreary. She had lived in such an atmosphere of masculine adulation while
under Lady Kirkbank's wing that it was a new thing to find herself in a
room where there were none to love and very few to praise her. She felt
out in the cold, as it were. Those ungloved critics, with their shabby
coats and dubious shirts, snuffy, smoky, everything they ought not to
be, seemed to her a race of barbarians.

Finding herself thus cold and lonely in the midst of the duchess's
splendour of peacock-blue velvet and peacock-feather decoration, Lesbia
was almost glad when in the middle of Madame Metzikoff's opening
gondolied--airy, fairy music, executed with surpassing delicacy--Mr.
Smithson crept gently into the _fauteuil_ just behind hers, and leant
over the back of the chair to whisper an inquiry as to her opinion of
the pianist's style.

'She is exquisite,' Lesbia murmured softly, but the whispered question
and the murmured answer, low as they were, provoked indignant looks from
a brace of damsels in Venetian red, who shook their Toby frills with an
outraged air.

Lesbia felt that Mr. Smithson's presence was hardly correct. It would
have been 'better form' if he had stayed away; and yet she was glad to
have him here. At the worst he was some one--nay, according to Lady
Kirkbank, he was the only one amongst all her admirers whose offer was
worth having. All Lesbia's other conquests had counted as barren honour;
but if she could have brought herself to accept Mr. Smithson she would
have secured the very best match of the season.

To marry a plain Mr. Smithso