"What is the exact meaning of the term, 'professional beauty'?" Thelma had asked Beau Lovelace on one occasion. "I suppose it is some very poor beautiful woman, who takes money for showing herself to the public, and having her portraits sold in the shops? And who is it that pays her?"
Lovelace broke into a laugh. "Upon my word, Lady Errington,--you have put the matter in a most original but indubitably correct light! Who pays the 'professional beauty,' you ask? Well, in the case of Mrs. Smith-Gresham, whom you met the other day, it is a certain Duke who pays her to the tune of several thousands a year. When he gets tired of her, or she of him, she'll find somebody else--or perhaps she'll go on the stage and swell the list of bad amateurs. She'll get on somehow, as long as she can find a fool ready to settle her dressmaker's bill."
"I do not understand!" said Thelma,--and her fair brows drew together in that pained grave look that was becoming rather frequent with her now.
And she began to ask fewer questions concerning the various strange phases of social life that puzzled her,--why, for instance, religious theorists made so little practical use of their theories,--why there were cloudy-eyed eccentrics who admired the faulty drawing of Watts, and the common-place sentence-writing of Walt Whitman,--why members of Parliament talked so much and did so little,--why new poets, however nobly inspired, were never accepted unless they had influential friends on the press,--why painters always married their models or their cooks, and got heartily ashamed of them afterwards,--and why people all round said so many things they did not mean. And confused by the general insincerity, she clung,--poor child!--to Lady Winsleigh, who had the tact to seem what she was not,--and the cleverness to probe into Thelma's nature and find out how translucently clear and pure it was--a perfect well of sweet water, into which one drop of poison, or better still, several drops, gradually and insidiously instilled, might in time taint its flavor and darken its brightness. For if a woman have an innocent, unsuspecting soul as delicate as the curled cup of a Nile lily, the more easily will it droop and wither in the heated grasp of a careless, cruel hand. And to this flower-crushing task Lady Winsleigh set herself,--partly for malice pretense against Errington, whose coldness to herself in past days had wounded her vanity, and partly for private jealousy of Thelma's beauty and attractiveness.