In
character she was the typical society woman: always charming,
generally insincere. She went to Kensington for her religion and
to Mayfair for her morals; accepted her literature from Mudie's and
her art from the Grosvenor Gallery; and could and would gabble
philanthropy, philosophy, and politics with equal fluency at every
five-o'clock tea-table she visited. Her ideas could always be
guaranteed as the very latest, and her opinion as that of the
person to whom she was talking. Asked by a famous novelist one
afternoon, at the Pioneer Club, to give him some idea of her,
little Mrs. Bund, the painter's wife, had remained for a few
moments with her pretty lips pursed, and had then said:
"She is a woman to whom life could bring nothing more fully
satisfying than a dinner invitation from a duchess, and whose
nature would be incapable of sustaining deeper suffering than that
caused by an ill-fitting costume."
At the time I should have said the epigram was as true as it was
cruel, but I suppose we none of us quite know each other.
I congratulated "Blase Billy," or to drop his Club nickname and
give him the full benefit of his social label, "The Hon.
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