Eastern
Kings. Only a tea-pot. Yet Rothschild deemed it worth a voyage from
England to India. That is what the love of the beautiful means, in Jew
or Gentile,' concluded the bard, smiling on the company, as they
gathered round the Florentine table on which the jade specimens were set
out, Lady Kirkbank looking at the little cups and basins as if she
thought they were going to do something, after all this fuss had been
made about them. It seemed hardly credible that any reasonable being
could have given thirty guineas for one of those bits of greenish-yellow
clouded glass, unless the thing had some peculiar property of expansion
or contraction.

After this breakfast in Park Lane Lady Lesbia and her admirer met daily.
He went to all her parties; he sat out waltzes with her, in
conservatories, and on staircases; for Horace Smithson was much too
shrewd a man too enter himself in the race for dancing men, handicapped
by his forty years and his fourteen stone. He contrived to amuse Lesbia
by his conversation, which was essentially mundane, depreciating people
whom all the rest of the world admired, or pretended to admire, telling
her of the secret springs by which the society she saw around her was
moved. He was judicious in his revelations of hidden evil, and careful
to say nothing which should offend Lady Lesbia's modesty; yet he
contrived in a very short time to teach her that the world in which she
lived was an utterly corrupt world, whose high priest was Satan; that
all lofty aspirations and noble sentiments were out of place in society;
and that the worst among the people she met were the people who laid any
claim to being better than their neighbours.

'That's why I adore Lady Kirkbank,' he said, confidentially. 'The dear
soul never pretends to be any better than the rest of us. She gambles,
and we all know she gambles; she pegs, and we all know she pegs; and she
makes rather a boast of being up to her eyes in debt. No humbug about
dear old Georgie.'

Lesbia had seen enough, of her chaperon by this time to know that Mr.
Smithson's description of the lady was correct, and, this being so, she
supposed that the facts and traits of character which he told her about
in other people were also true. She thus adopted the Smithsonian, or
fashionable-pessimist view of society in general, and resigned herself
to the idea that the world was a very wicked world, as well as a very
pleasant world, that the wickedest people were ge