his girl.

And then came the visit to the dressmaker. It happened after all that
Kate Kearney was not intrusted with Lady Lesbia's frocks. Miss Kearney
was the fashion, and could pick and choose her customers; and as she was
a young lady of good business aptitudes, she had a liking for ready
money, or at least half-yearly settlements; and, finding that Lady
Kirkbank was much more willing to give new orders than to pay old
accounts, she had respectfully informed her ladyship that a pressure of
business would prevent her executing any further demands from Arlington
Street, while the necessity of posting her ledger obliged her to request
the favour of an immediate cheque.

The little skirmish--per letter--occurred while Lady Kirkbank was at
Cannes, and Miss Kearney's conduct was stigmatised as insolent and
ungrateful, since had not she, Lady Kirkbank by the mere fact of her
patronage, given this young person her chief claim to fashion?

'I shall drop her,' said Georgie, 'and go back to poor old Seraphine,
who is worth a cartload of such Irish adventuresses.'

So to Madame Seraphine, of Clanricarde Place, Lady Lesbia was taken as
a lamb to the slaughter-house.

Seraphine had made Lady Kirkbank's clothes, off and on for the last
thirty years. Seraphine and Georgia had grown old together. Lady
Kirkbank was always dropping Seraphine and taking her up again,
quarrelling and making friends with her. They wrote each other little
notes, in which Lady Kirkbank called the dressmaker her _cher ange_--her
_bonne chatte_, her _chere vielle sotte_--and all manner of affectionate
names--and in which Seraphine occasionally threatened the lady with the
dire engines of the law, if money were not forthcoming before Saturday
evening.

Lady Kirkbank within those thirty years had paid Seraphine many
thousands; but she had never once got herself out of the dear creature's
debt. All her payments were payments on account. A hundred pounds; or
fifty--or an occasional cheque for two hundred and fifty, when Sir
George had been lucky at Newmarket and Doncaster. But the rolling
nucleus of debt went rolling on, growing bigger every year until the
payments on account needed to be larger or more numerous than of old to
keep Seraphine in good humour.

Seraphine was a woman of genius and versatility and had more than one
art at her fingers' ends--those skinny and claw-shaped fingers, the
nails whereof were not always clean. She took charge of her cu