“C. Q.” or, In the Wireless House
Lowell has produced more than one English beauty, and so has Fall River! God bless them! And “lovely Lily Leslie from Lowell,” having boxed the ears of a prince and rolled him down a grass terrace at Sandringham, eventually accepted the hand of a complaisant commoner who was ready to sacrifice his domestic security to a vicarious social prominence. Now she was Mrs. Hubert Trevelyan—still of the inner circles, but without the flare that had made her the toast of English hunting-lodges. The white neck was still round, but almost imperceptibly it flowered at the top toward a chin once the ecstasy of sculptors, which now had lost by a dim shade its clearness of outline.
She was still spoken of as one of the most beautiful women in the world; but the exquisite hour of her perfection had passed. Then, perhaps feeling that her supremacy was no longer undisputed, a sense of pique at younger and fresher women had led her into certain too flagrant indiscretions that could not be overlooked. Lord Knollys had intimated that a knighthood might please her husband; and the directorate of the Royal Bank of Edinburgh,44
