Lady Bell could have got into almost any set. Though she had no claims to dabbling in literature, she would have been granted admittance to the assemblies of the blues—in the drawing-rooms of Lady Charleville, Mrs. Boscawen, and the great Mrs. Montague. But the truth was that Lady Bell did not altogether appreciate classical poses and coquettings with the muse, and did not care for the fine gentlemen who were so sensitive about her reading their poems, and the great ladies who were so fond of hearing themselves speak. Lady Bell had once taken a prominent part in an election, yet she was as guileless as most young women of eighteen of comprehending or caring for politics, unless, indeed, they bore on such sentimental, sensational questions as the imprisonment of the Queen of Denmark—the marriage of the Pretender—or Lord Mansfield’s decision that no slave could be sent back from England to the chain and the lash of a taskmaster. Still, that trifling deficiency might not have prevented her from entering the ranks of the fair enthusiasts, who, in the vacancy or the usurped possession of heart and mind, and in the craving for excitement which circumstances fostered, were already short-sighted partisans and reckless agitators for and against American independence, in sympathy with or in hostility to French philosophers. Lady Bell would have proved an invaluable acquisition even to the sisters Devonshire and Duncannon and to Mrs. Crew, who would have opened their exclusive arms to her, for they forgot to be rivals in their fervent worship at the one shrine of their half-splendid, half-brutified idol, who could guide alike a steed and a state. But Lady Bell shrank from the wild devotion to the buff and the blue, or to any other colour of the rainbow. She contented herself with marvelling at Anne, Duchess of Northumberland, haranguing the populace from a window in Covent Garden, on the election of her brother-in-law, Lord Percy, and with freely owning that this performance far surpassed any of her, Lady Bell Trevor’s, election achievements. Lady Bell was too young, too pretty, and at once too rich and too poor, to take to the card-tables, which were still more enthralling than the hustings to their votaries, and which were the conspicuous accompaniments of every entertainment. She might have had gambling in her blood, through her relationship to Squire Godwin, but her life at St. Bevis’s and Mrs. Sundon’s experience had destroyed the constitutional predilection.