'
'Lady Kirkbank's claws! What a horrible way in which to speak of a
friend. I thought you adored Lady Kirkbank.'
'So I do. We all adore her, but not as a guide for youth. As a specimen
of the elderly female of the latter half of the nineteenth century, she
is perfect. Such gush, such juvenility, such broad views, such an utter
absence of starch; but as a lamp for the footsteps of girlhood--no
_there_ we must pause.'
'You are very ungrateful. Do you know that poor Lady Kirkbank has been
most strenuous in your behalf?'
'Oh, yes, I know that.'
'And you are not grateful?'
'I intend to be very grateful, so grateful as to entirely satisfy Lady
Kirkbank.'
'You are horribly cynical. That reminds me, there was a poor girl whom
Lady Kirkbank had under her wing one season--a Miss Trinder, to whom I
am told you behaved shamefully.'
'There was a parson's daughter who threw herself at my head in a most
audacious way, and who behaved so badly, egged on by Lady Kirkbank, that
I had to take refuge in flight. Do you suppose I am the kind of man to
marry the first adventurous damsel who takes a fancy to my town house,
and thinks it would be a happy hunting ground for a herd of brothers and
sisters? Miss Trinder was shocking bad style, and her designs were
transparent from the very beginning! I let her flirt as much as she
liked; and when she began to be seriously sentimental I took wing for
the East?'
'Was she pretty?' asked Lesbia, not displeased at this contemptuous
summing up of poor Belle Trinder's story.
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