Upon this Mr. Rutherford had to say something polite, a something which implied that his wife would be charmed to see more of the lovely Mrs. Bellenden. People talked of Mrs. Bellenden's beauty to her face. It was one of the things which her own sex registered against her as a mark of bad style. She might be ever so handsome, other women admitted, but she was the worst possible style. A circus rider, promoted from the sawdust to a Mayfair drawing-room, could hardly have been worse. * * * * * It was not long since this woman had burst upon the world of London--a revelation of physical loveliness. Then felt they, like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken. There are planets and planets, as there are skies and skies. Assuredly neither Uranus nor Neptune created a greater ferment in the world of the wise than was made by Mrs. Bellenden's first season in the world of the foolish. The phrase "professional beauty" had been exploded, as vulgar and stale, but the type remained under new names. Mrs. Bellenden was simply the new beauty; invited everywhere; the star of every fashionable week-end party, every smart dance or dinner. Afternoon or evening--to hear divine music or to play ridiculous games; to be instructed about radium, or to lose money and temper at bridge, there could be no party really successful without Mrs. Bellenden. Men looked round the flower-garden of picture hats with a disappointed air if her eyes did not flash lovely lightning from under one of them. Impetuous youths made a bee-line for her, and threaded the crowd with relentless elbows, calmly ignoring their loves of last season and the season before last. "Men are absolute idiots about that woman," the last seasons told each other. "No one has a look in where she is." Mrs. Bellenden was a young widow, a widow of two years' widowhood, the first of which it was whispered she had spent in a private lunatic asylum. "That's where she got her complexion," said Malice. "It was just as good as a year's rest in a nursing home." "And a strait-waistcoat. That's where she got her figure," said Envy.