'Well, it would be very sweet if they were to meet next season and fall in love with each other,' said Lady Kirkbank. 'He is enormously rich, and I daresay your girls will not be portionless.'
'Lesbia may take a modest place among heiresses,' answered Lady Maulevrier. 'I have lived so quietly during the last forty years that I could hardly help saving money.'
'How nice!' sighed Georgie. 'I never saved sixpence in my life, and am always in debt.'
'The little fortune I have saved is much too small for division. Lesbia will therefore have all I can leave her. Mary has the usual provision as a daughter of the Maulevrier house.'
'And I suppose Lesbia has that provision also?'
'Of course.'
'Lucky Lesbia. I only wish Hartfield were coming to us for the shooting. I would engage he should fall in love with her. Kirkbank is a splendid place for match-making. But the fact is I am not very intimate with him. He is almost always travelling, and when he is at home he is not in our set. And now, my dear Diana, tell me more about yourself, and your own life in this delicious place.'
'There is so little to tell. The books I have read, the theories of literature and art and science which I have adopted and dismissed, learnt and forgotten—those are the history of my life. The ideas of the outside world reach me here only in books and newspapers; but you who have been living in the world must have so much to say. Let me be the listener.'
Lady Kirkbank desired nothing better. She rattled on for three-quarters of an hour about her doings in the great world, her social triumphs, the wonderful things she had done for Sir George, who seemed to be as a puppet in her hands, the princes and princelings she had entertained, the songs she had composed, the comedy she had written, for private representation only, albeit the Haymarket manager was dying to produce it, the scathing witticisms with which she had withered her social enemies. She would have gone on much longer, but for the gong, which reminded her that it was time to dress for dinner.
Half-an-hour later Lady Kirkbank was in the drawing-room, where Mary had retired to the most shadowy corner, anxious to escape the gaze of the fashionable visitor.