e you seen your friend, Sir Philip, since he came to town?" asks
Mrs. Rush-Marvelle in her stately way.

"Several times. I have dined with him and Lady Errington frequently. I
understand they are to be here to-night?"

Lady Winsleigh fans herself a little more rapidly, and her full crimson
lips tighten into a thin, malicious line.

"Well, I asked them, of course,--as a matter of form," she says
carelessly,--"but I shall, on the whole, be rather relieved if they
don't come."

A curious, amused look comes over Lorimer's face.

"Indeed! May I ask why?"

"I should think the reason ought to be perfectly apparent to you"--and
her ladyship's eyes flash angrily. "Sir Philip is all very well--he is
by birth a gentleman,--but the person he has married is not a lady, and
it is an exceedingly unpleasant duty for me to have to receive her."

A feint tinge of color flushes Lorimer's brow. "I think," he says
slowly, "I think you will find yourself mistaken, Lady Winsleigh. I
believe--" Here he pauses, and Mrs. Rush-Marvelle fixes him with a stony
stare.

"Are we to understand that she is educated?" she inquires freezingly.
"Positively well-educated?"

Lorimer laughs. "Not according to the standard of modern fashionable
requirements!" he replies.

Mrs. Marvelle sniffs the air portentously,--Lady Clara curls her lip. At
that moment everybody makes respectful way for one of the most important
guests of the evening--a broad-shouldered man of careless attire, rough
hair, fine features, and keen, mischievous eyes--a man of whom many
stand in wholesome awe,--Beaufort Lovelace, or as he is commonly called.
"Beau" Lovelace, a brilliant novelist, critic, and pitiless satirist.
For him society is a game,--a gay humming-top which he spins on the palm
of his hand for his own private amusement. Once a scribbler in an attic,
subsisting bravely on bread and cheese and hope, he now lords it more
than half the year in a palace of fairy-like beauty on the Lago di
Como,--and he is precisely the same person who was formerly disdained
and flouted by fair ladies because his clothes were poor and shabby, yet
for whom they now practise all the arts known to their sex, in fruitless
endeavors to charm and conciliate him. For he laughs at them and their
pretty ways,--and his laughter is merciless. His arrowy glance discovers
the "poudre de riz" on their blooming cheeks,--the carmine on their
lips, and the "kohl" on their eyelashes. He knows purchased