A RASTAQUOUÈRE.
There was a dinner party in one of the new houses in Grosvenor Place that evening, to which Lady Kirkbank and Lesbia had been bidden. The new house belonged to a new man, who was supposed to have made millions out of railways, and other gigantic achievements in the engineering line; and the new man and his wife were friends of Mr. Smithson, and had made the simple Georgie's acquaintance only within the last three weeks.
'Of course they are stupid, my dear,' she remarked, in response to some slighting remark of Lesbia's, 'but I am always willing to know rich people. One drops in for so many good things; and they never want any return in kind. It is quite enough for them to be allowed to spend their money upon us.'
The house was gorgeous in all the glory of the very latest fashions in upholstery; hall Algerian; dining-room Pompeian; drawing-room Early Italian; music-room Louis Quatorze; billiard-room mediæval English. The dinner was as magnificent as dinner can be made. Three-fourths of the guests were the haute gomme of the financial world, and perspired gold. The other third belonged to a class which Mr. Smithson described somewhat contemptuously as the shake-back nobility. An Irish peer, a younger son of a ducal house that had run to seed, a political agitator, a grass widow whose titled husband was governor of an obscure colony, an ancient dowager with hair which was too luxuriant to be anything but a wig, and diamonds which were so large as to suggest paste.
Lesbia sat by her affianced at the glittering table, lighted with clusters of wax candles, which shone upon a level parterre of tea roses, gardenias, and gloire de Malmaison carnations; from which rose at intervals groups of silver-gilt dolphins, supporting shallow golden dishes piled with peaches, grapes, and all the costliest produce of Covent Garden.
Conversation was not particularly brilliant, nor had the guests an elated air. The thermometer was near eighty, and at this period of the season everybody was tired of this kind of dinner, and would gladly have foregone the greatest achievements of culinary art, in favour of a chicken and a salad, eaten under green leaves, in a garden at Wargrave or Henley, within sound of the rippling river.
On Lesbia's right hand there was a portly personage of Jewish type, dark to swarthiness, and somewhat oily, whose every word suggested bullion. He and Mr. Smithson were evidently acquaintances of long standing, and Mr. Smithson presented him to Lesbia, whereupon he joined in their conversation now and then.
His talk was of the usual standard. He had seen everything worth seeing in London and in Paris, between which cities he seemed to oscillate with such frequency that he might be said to live in both places at once. He had his stall at Covent Garden, and his stall at the Grand Opera. He was a subscriber at the Theatre Français. He had seen all the races at Longchamps and Chantilly, as well as at Sandown and Ascot. But every now and then he and Mr. Smithson drifted from the customary talk about operas and races, pictures and French novels, to the wider world of commerce and speculation, mines, waterworks, and foreign loans—and Lesbia leant back in her chair, and fanned herself languidly, with half-closed eyelids, while two or three courses went round, she giving the little supercilious look at each entrée offered to her, to be observed on such occasions, as if the thing offered were particularly nasty.
She wondered how long the two men were going to prose about mines and shares, in those subdued half-mysterious voices, telling each other occult facts in half-expressed phrases, utterly dark to the outside world; but, while she was languidly wondering, a change in her lover's manner startled her into keenest curiosity.
'Montesma is in Paris,' said Mr. Sampayo, the dark gentleman; 'I dined last week with him at the Continental.'