'Who was Belle Trinder?'
'An Essex parson's daughter whom I took under my wing five years ago—a splendid girl, large and fair, and just a trifle coarse—not to be spoken of in the same day with you, dearest; but still a decidedly handsome creature. And she took remarkably well. She was a very lively girl, "never ran mute," Sir George used to say. Sir George was very fond of her. She amused him, poor girl, with her rather brainless rattle.'
'And Mr. Smithson admired her?'
'Followed her about everywhere, sent her whole flower gardens in the way of bouquets and Japanese baskets, and floral parures for her gowns, and opera boxes and concert tickets. Their names were always coupled. People used to call them Bel and the Dragon. The poor child made up her mind she was to be Mrs. Smithson. She used to talk of what she would do for her own people—the poor old father, buried alive in a damp parsonage, and struggling every winter with chronic bronchitis; the four younger sisters pining in dulness and penury; the mother who hardly knew what it was to rest from the continual worries of daily life.'
'Poor things!' sighed Lesbia, gazing admiringly at the handle of her last new sunshade.
'Belle used to talk of what she would do for them all,' pursued Lady Kirkbank. 'Father should go every year to the villa at Monte Carlo; mother and the girls should have a month in Park Lane every season, and their autumn holiday at one of Mr. Smithson's country houses. I knew the world well enough to be sure that this kind of thing would never answer with a man like Smithson. It is only one man in a thousand—the modern Arthur, the modern Quixote—who will marry a whole family. I told Belle as much, but she laughed. She felt so secure of her power over the man. "He will do anything I ask him," she said.'
'Miss Trinder must be an extraordinary young person,' observed Lesbia, scornfully. 'The man had not proposed, had he?'
'No; the actual proposal hung fire, but Belle thought it was a settled thing all the same. Everybody talked to her as if she were engaged to Smithson, and those poor, ignorant vicarage girls used to write her long letters of congratulation, envying her good fortune, speculating about what she would do when she was married. The girl was too open and candid for London society—talked too much, "gave the view before she was sure of her fox," Sir George said. All this silly talk came to Smithson's ears, and one morning we read in the Post that Mr. Smithson had started the day before for Algiers, where he was to stay at the house of the English Consul, and hunt lions. We waited all day, hoping for some letter of explanation, some friendly farewell which would mean à revoir. But there was nothing, and then poor Belle gave way altogether. She shut herself up in her room, and went out of one hysterical fit into another. I never heard a girl sob so terribly. She was not fit to be seen for a week, and then she went home to her father's parsonage in the flat swampy country on the borders of Suffolk, and eat her heart, as Byron calls it. And the worst of it was that she had no actual justification for considering herself jilted. She had talked, and other people had talked, and among them they had settled the business. But Smithson had said hardly anything. He had only flirted to his heart's content, and had spent a few hundreds upon flowers, gloves, fans, and opera tickets, which perhaps would not have been accepted by a girl with a strong sense of her own dignity.'
'I should think not, indeed,' interjected Lesbia.
'But which poor Belle was only too delighted to get.'