Lady Lesbia was of a different temper.  She loved ease and elegance, the gracious luxuries of life.  She loved art and music, but not to labour hard at either.  She played and sang a little—­excellently within that narrow compass which she had allotted to herself—­played Mendelssohn’s ‘Lieder’ with finished touch and faultless phrasing, sang Heine’s ballads with consummate expression.  She painted not at all.  Why should anyone draw or paint indifferently, she asked, when Providence has furnished the world with so many great painters in the past and present?  She could not understand Mary’s ardent desire to do the thing herself,—­to be able with her own pencil and her own brush to reproduce the lakes and valleys, the wild brown hills she loved so passionately.  Lesbia did not care two straws for the lovely lake district amidst which she had been reared,—­every pike and force, every beck and gill whereof was distinctly dear to her younger sister.  She thought it a very hard thing to have spent so much of her life at Fellside, a trial that would have hardly been endurable if it were not for grandmother.  Grandmother and Lesbia adored each other.  Lesbia was the one person for whom Lady Maulevrier’s stateliness was subjugated by perfect love.  To all the rest of the world the Countess was marble, but to Lesbia she was wax.  Lesbia could mould her as she pleased; but happily Lesbia was not the kind of young person to take advantage of this privilege; she was thoroughly ductile or docile, and had no desire, at present, which ran counter to her grandmother.

Lesbia was a beauty.  In her nineteenth year she was a curious reproduction in face and figure, expression and carriage, of that Lady Diana Angersthorpe who five and forty years ago fluttered the dove-cots of St. James’s and Mayfair by her brilliant beauty and her keen intelligence.  There in the panelled drawing-room at Fellside hung Harlow’s portrait of Lady Diana in her zenith, in a short-waisted, white satin frock, with large puffed gauze sleeves, through which the perfect arm showed dimly.  Standing under that picture Lady Lesbia looked as if she had stepped out of the canvas.  She was to be painted by Millais next year.  Lady Maulevrier said, when she had been introduced, and society was beginning to talk about her:  for Lady Maulevrier made up her mind five or six years ago that Lesbia should be the reigning beauty of her season.  To this end she had educated and trained her, furnishing her with all those graces best calculated to please and astonish society.  She was too clever a woman not to discover Lesbia’s shallowness and lack of all great gifts, save that one peerless dower of perfect beauty.  She knew exactly what Lesbia could be trained to do; and to this end Lesbia had been educated; and to this end Lady Maulevrier brought down to Fellside the most accomplished of Hanoverian governesses, who had learned French in Paris, and had toiled in the educational mill with profit to