eorgie. 'You don't
seem to admire any of my favourite men.'

'They are very nice,' Lesbia answered languidly; 'but they are all
alike. They say the same things--wear the same clothes--sit in the same
attitude. One would think they were all drilled in a body every morning
before they go out. Mr. Nightshade, the actor, who came to supper the
other night, is the only man I have seen who has a spark of
originality.'

'You are right,' answered Lady Kirkbank, 'there is an appalling sameness
in men: only it is odd you should find it out so soon. I never
discovered it till I was an old woman. How I envy Cleopatra her Caesar
and her Antony. No mistaking one of those for the other. Mary Stuart
too, what marked varieties of character she had an opportunity of
studying in Rizzio and Chastelard, Darnley and Bothwell. Ah, child, that
is what it is to _live_.'

'Mary is very interesting,' sighed Lesbia; 'but I fear she was not a
correct person.'

'My love, what correct person ever is interesting? History draws a misty
halo round a sinner of that kind, till one almost believes her a saint.
I think Mary Stuart, Froude's Mary, simply perfect.'

Lesbia had begun by blushing at Lady Kirkbank's opinions; but she was
now used to the audacity of the lady's sentiments, and the almost
infantile candour with which she gave utterance to them. Lady Kirkbank
liked to make her friends laugh. It was all she could do now in order to
be admired. And there is nothing like audacity for making people laugh
nowadays. Lady Kirkbank was a close student of all those delightful
books of French memoirs which bring the tittle-tattle of the Regency and
the scandals of Louis the Fifteenth's reign so vividly before us: and
she had unconsciously founded her manners and her ways of thinking and
talking upon that easy-going but elegant age. She did not want to seem
better than women who had been so altogether charming. She fortified the
frivolity of historical Parisian manners by a dash of the British
sporting character. She drove, shot, jumped over five-barred gates,
contrived on the verge of seventy to be as active us a young woman; and
she flattered herself that the mixture of wit, audacity, sport, and
good-nature was full of fascination.

However this might be, it is certain that a good many people liked her,
chiefly perhaps because she was good-natured, and a little on account of
that admirable cook.

To Lesbia, who had been weary to loathing of her old