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in his thoughts. He would give her the sort of news that a devoted husband gives a wife; he would write about the weather or the shooting or the racing. In describing the society beauties at Cowes, during a season that she was not with him, he would hasten to add that, somewhat to his own surprise, he was not flirting with any of them. Sometimes his letters were accompanied by a brace of pheasant; at others he would enclose the ticket to Ascot which she had wanted for a friend.
    Such was the depth of Bertie's regard for Lillie that long after the first flush of his infatuation had faded and they had gone their separate ways, he would continue to see her and to write her his tender, concerned, affectionate letters; always signing them with a simple A.E. (for Albert Edward) and always opening them with the words 'My Fair Lily'.

4
    'Dreams of Fairyland'
    I NDISPUTABLE PROOF of Lillie Langtry's social acceptability came in her second season. She was presented at court; presented, not to the Prince of Wales who sometimes deputised for Queen Victoria on these occasions, but to the Queen herself.
    Until the late 1950s, when the young Queen Elizabeth II finally abolished the by then meaningless ceremony, presentation at court was regarded as the
sine qua non
of social recognition. No debutante was considered fully 'out' – out, that is, of girlhood and into society – until she had been formally presented to the monarch. The ritual was enacted at special presentation parties, as soon after a girl's eighteenth birthday as possible. Together with putting up her hair and letting down her skirts, being launched at her own coming-out ball and attending a prodigious number of other balls and parties, presentation at court was part of a young woman's initiation into society.
    But presentation was not confined to debutantes. Married women – colonials, foreigners, women who had married Englishmen, who had been out of the country at eighteen or who had gained prominence in national life – could also be presented. Provided they had a 'presenter' or sponsor, usually a woman who had herself been presented, any aspiring socialite could make her curtsey to the sovereign. Some of these sponsors were not above making the necessary introductions for a cash consideration. An occasion which, in early days, had been confined to exclusively aristocratic circles, became progressively less select. 'We had to stop it,' said one member of the royal family recently, 'every tart in London was being presented.' 1 A more valid reason was that, in a more egalitarian age, the whole concept of 'society' had become outdated.
    For a century or more, however, presentation at court remained the goal of every socially ambitious woman. What should she do, askedone desperate American matron of one of the young Vanderbilts, to get her daughter presented?
    'Don't you know anything about presentation at the court of St James's?' he asked.
    'No, but I do know that it would be marvellous for my girl,' she answered.
    The young man, more enlightened than most, did his best to dissuade her. In graphic detail he outlined the disadvantages of the whole business: the months of learning how to conduct oneself, the expense of the clothes, the strain on the nerves, the tedium of waiting – first in the carriage procession in the Mall and then in the palace ante-chamber – and all for the dubious thrill of curtseying to a person who would never recognise one again.
    In silence, the mother heard him out. 'I see,' she said when he had finished this grim catalogue of drawbacks. 'And now tell me what I should do to get my daughter on the list of presentees?' 2
    Whereas the Prince of Wales, on ascending the throne as Edward VII, reintroduced evening Presentation Courts, Queen Victoria held them in the afternoons, when they were known as Drawing Rooms. These Drawing Rooms (at which, noted one debutante tartly, 'Her Majesty does not offer any refreshments to the guests' 3 ) might have