worth
talking about, except Mr. Smithson.

'Don't tell your grandmother anything about the bills for a week or
two,' said Lady Kirkbank, soothingly. 'The creatures can wait for their
money. Give yourself time to think.'

'I will,' answered Lesbia, dolefully.

'And now make haste, and get ready for the Ranelagh. My love, your eyes
are dreadfully heavy. You _must_ use a little belladonna. I'll send
Rilboche to you.'

And for the first time in her life, Lesbia, too depressed to argue the
point, consented to have her eyes doctored by Rilboche.

She was gay enough at the Ranelagh, and looked her loveliest at a dinner
party that evening, and went to three parties after the dinner, and went
home in the faint light of early morning, after sitting out a late waltz
in a balcony with Mr. Smithson, a balcony banked round with hot-house
flowers which were beginning to droop a little in the chilly morning
air, just as beauty drooped under the searching eye of day.

Lesbia put the bills in her desk, and gave herself time to think, as
Lady Kirkbank advised her. But the thinking progress resulted in very
little good. All the thought of which she was capable would not reduce
the totals of those two dreadful accounts. And every day brought some
fresh bill. The stationer, the bootmaker, the glover, the perfumer,
people who had courted Lady Lesbia's custom with an air which implied
that the honour of serving fashionable beauty was the first
consideration, and the question of payment quite a minor point--these
now began to ask for their money in the most prosaic way. Every straw
added to Lesbia's burden; and her heart grew heavier with every post.

'One can see the season is waning when these people begin to pester
with their accounts,' said Lady Kirkbank, who always talked of tradesmen
as if they were her natural enemies.

Lesbia accepted this explanation of the avalanche of bills, and never
suspected Lady Kirkbank's influence in the matter. It happened, however,
that the chaperon, having her own reasons for wishing to bring Mr.
Smithson's suit to a successful issue, had told Seraphine and the other
people to send in their bills immediately. Lady Lesbia would be leaving
London in a week or so, she informed these purveyors, and would like to
settle everything before she went away.

Mr. Smithson appeared in Arlington Street almost every day, and was full
of schemes for new pleasures--or pleasures as nearly new as the world of
fashi