Lady Lucie did not have the good fortune in one sense to find herself select in her contemporaries, neither was she particular according to modern canons. She drew back, and looked another way, when the notorious Lady Harrington swept by. But although she protested against shocking scandals, her sense of right and wrong was blunted to the quieter ghastliness of heartless unrighteousness. She did not see any objection to exchanging friendly greetings with Anne, Countess of Upper Ossory, who had once been Duchess of Grafton, when she had agreed politely with her duke that their marriage should be dissolved by act of Parliament, and they had parted with a promise of friendship till death, and of constant correspondence; she had gone her way, which meant marrying splendidly the Earl of Upper Ossory; and the duke had gone his, which included contracting his characteristic alliance. Notwithstanding, Lady Lucie was almost guilty of pushing before Lady Bell, and hiding her with Lady Lucie’s hoop, to screen the little girl from the blighting regards of “Old Queensberry.” It was all very well that Lady Bell’s _début_ should be mentioned at White’s in the middle of such topics as this year’s Newmarket, or that game of faro, by some of those sleepy-eyed, grandly courteous, shockingly wicked, men, remnants of the old lady’s generation. Such notice need not hurt Lady Bell—nay, it was in the course of her promotion, and was greater luck than might be expected for her; but that the simple child after all, in spite of her bringing up in the centre of the tainted, tangled great world, should be exposed to deadly danger by actual contact with the chiefs of debauchery, was more than Lady Lucie bargained for. It would have been a hideous world in high places if such figures as those of Lucy Harrington and the Duke of Queensbury had been the sole company on the stage. But the round, ruddy-faced king, in his prime, whose homeliness, viewed even by his splendid courtiers’ eyes, was then held the model of royal affability, who smiled honestly on Lady Bell, with her poor fluttering heart in her mouth, in the august presence of such a star and blue riband, was, to his everlasting honour, a model of virtue in that generation. “What! what!” the king questioned, “Penruddock? Etheredge? Then the young lady is not a grand-daughter of my Lady Lucie? As for Etheredge, can any one tell me why I have not heard the name before?” his Majesty asked, having forgotten the earldom which had become extinct, though he never forgot a face. A model of virtue, also, in her formality and starch, with her fixed ideas of what was due to a queen, even as her George would be a king, stood little plain-featured Queen Charlotte, with her plainness still redeemed by the freshness of comparative youth, in addition to the indomitable queenliness which age and trials failed to subdue.