Then came the classical subjects of the last new school. Weak imitations of Alma Tadema. Nero admiring his mother's corpse; Claudius interrupting Messalina's marriage with her lover Silus; Clodius disguised among the women of Cæsar's household; Pyrrha's grotto. Lady Kirkbank expatiated upon all the pictures, and generally made unlucky guesses at the subjects of them. Classical literature was not her strong point. Mr. Meander, the poet, discovered that all the beautiful heads were like Miss Fitzherbert. 'It is the same line,' he exclaimed, 'the line of lilies and flowing waters--the gracious ineffable upward returning ripple of the true _retroussé_ nose, the divine _flou_, the loveliness which has lain dormant for centuries--nay, was at one period of debased art scorned and trampled under foot by the porcine multitude, as akin to the pug and the turn-up, until discovered and enshrined on the altar of the Beautiful by the Boticelli Revivalists.' Miss Fitzherbert simpered, and accepted these remarks as mere statements of obvious fact. She was accustomed to hear of Boticelli and the early Italian painters in connection with her own charms of face and figure. Lesbia, whose faultless features were of the aquiline type, regarded the bard's rhapsody as insufferable twaddle, and began to think Mr. Smithson almost a wit when he made fun of the bard. Smithson was enchanted when she laughed at his jokelets, even although she did not scruple to tell him that she thought his favourite pictures detestable, and looked with the eye of indifference on a collection of jade that was worth a small fortune. Mr. Meander fell into another rhapsody over those classic cups and shallow little bowls of absinthe-coloured jade.