tic society, and finds that there is another
French, a complete and copious language, of which he knows not a word.

Lesbia began to think that she had a great deal to learn. She began to
wonder even whether, in the event of her having made rather too free use
of Lady Maulevrier's _carte blanche_, it might not be well to make a new
departure in the art of dressing, and to wear untrimmed cashmere gowns,
and rags of limp lace.

After breakfast they all went to look at Mr. Smithson's picture gallery.
His pictures were, as he had told Lesbia, chiefly of the French school,
and there may have been a remote period--say, in the time of good Queen
Charlotte--when such pictures would hardly have been exhibited to young
ladies. His pictures were Mr. Smithson's own unaided choice. Here the
individual taste of the man stood revealed.

There were two or three Geromes; and in the place of honour at the end
of the gallery there was a grand Delaroche, Anne Boleyn's last letter to
the king, the hapless girl-queen sitting at a table in her gloomy cell
in the Tower, a shaft of golden light from the narrow window streaming
on the fair, disordered hair, the face bleached with unutterable woe, a
sublime image of despair and self-abandonment.

The larger pictures were historical, classic, grand: but the smaller
pictures--the lively little bits of colour dotted in here and
there--were of that new school which Mr. Smithson affected. They were of
that school which is called Impressionist, in which ballet dancers and
jockeys, burlesque actresses, masked balls, and all the humours of the
side scenes are represented with the sublime audacity of an art which
disdains finish, and relies on _chic, fougue, chien, flou, v'lan_, the
inspiration of the moment. Lesbia blushed as she looked at the ballet
girls, the maskers in their scanty raiment, the _demi-mondaines_ lolling
out of their opera boxes, and half out of their gowns, with false smiles
and frizzled hair. And then there came the works of that other school
which lavishes the finish of a Meissonier on the most meretricious
compositions. A woman in a velvet gown warming her dainty little feet on
a gilded fender, in a boudoir all aglow with colour and lamplight; a
cavalier in satin raiment buckling his sword-belt before a Venetian
mirror; a pair of lovers kissing in a sunlit corridor; a girl in a
hansom cab; a milliner's shop; and so on, and so on.

Then came the classical subjects of the last new