portrait of Lady Diana in her zenith, in a short-waisted, white
satin frock, with large puffed gauze sleeves, through which the perfect
arm showed dimly. Standing under that picture Lady Lesbia looked as if
she had stepped out of the canvas. She was to be painted by Millais next
year. Lady Maulevrier said, when she had been introduced, and society
was beginning to talk about her: for Lady Maulevrier made up her mind
five or six years ago that Lesbia should be the reigning beauty of her
season. To this end she had educated and trained her, furnishing her
with all those graces best calculated to please and astonish society.
She was too clever a woman not to discover Lesbia's shallowness and lack
of all great gifts, save that one peerless dower of perfect beauty. She
knew exactly what Lesbia could be trained to do; and to this end Lesbia
had been educated; and to this end Lady Maulevrier brought down to
Fellside the most accomplished of Hanoverian governesses, who had
learned French in Paris, and had toiled in the educational mill with
profit to herself and her pupils for a quarter of a century. To this
lady the Countess entrusted the education of her granddaughters' minds,
while for their physical training she provided another teacher in the
person of a clever little Parisian dancing mistress, who had set up at
the West-End of London as a teacher of dancing and calisthenics, and had
utterly failed to find pupils enough to pay her rent and keep her modest
_pot-au-feu_ going. Mademoiselle Thiebart was very glad to exchange the
uncertainties of a first floor in North Audley Street for the comfort
and security of Fellside Manor, with a salary of one hundred and fifty
pounds a year.

Both Fraeulein and Mademoiselle had been quick to discover that Lady
Lesbia was the apple of her grandmother's eye, while Lady Mary was
comparatively an outsider.

So it came about that Mary's education was in somewise a mere picking-up
of the crumbs which fell from Lesbia's table, and that she was allowed
in a general way to run wild. She was much quicker at any intellectual
exercise than Lesbia. She learned the lessons that were given her at
railroad speed, and rattled off her exercises with a slap-dash
penmanship which horrified the neat and niggling Fraeulein, and then
rushed off to the lake or mountain, and by this means grew browner and
browner, and more indelibly freckled day by day, thus widening the gulf
between herself and her beauty s