George Meredith
Sandra Belloni (originally Emilia in England). Complete
Lady Charlotte held forth her hand. Emilia would not take it before she had replied, “I knew this before you came,” and then she pressed the extended fingers.
Lady Charlotte drew her close. “Has Wilfrid taken you into his confidence so far?”
Emilia explained that she had heard it from his father.
The lady’s face lit up as from a sting of anger. “Very well—very well,” she said; and, presently, “You are right when you speak of the power of lying in men. Observe—Wilfrid told me that not one living creature knew there was question of an engagement between us. What would you do in my case?”
Emilia replied, “Forgive him; and I should think no more of it.”
“Yes. It would be right; and, presuming him to have the vice, I could be of immense service to him, if at least he does not lie habitually. But this is a description of treachery, you know.”
“Oh!” cried Emilia, “what kind of treachery is that, if he only will keep his heart open for me to give all mine to it!”
She stood clutching her hands in the half-sobbing ecstasy which signalises a spiritual exaltation built on disquiet. She had shown small emotion hitherto. The sight of it was like the sight of a mighty hostile power to Lady Charlotte—a power that moved her—that challenged, and irritated, and subdued her. For she saw there something that she had not; and being of a nature leaning to great-mindedness, though not of the first rank, she could not meanly mask her own deficiency by despising it. To do this is the secret evil by which souls of men and women stop their growth.
Lady Charlotte decided now to say good-bye. Her parting was friendly—the form of it consisting of a nod, an extension of the hand, and a kind word or two.
When alone, Emilia wondered why she kept taking long breaths, and tried to correct herself: but the heart laboured. Yet she seemed to have no thought in her mind; she had no active sensation of pity or startled self-love. She went to smooth Mr. Pole’s pillow, as to a place of forgetfulness. The querulous tyrannies of the invalid relieved her; but the heavy lifting of her chest returned the moment she was alone. She mentioned it to the doctor, who prescribed for liver, informing her that the said organ conducted one of the most important functions of her bodily system.
Emilia listened to the lecturer, and promised to take his medicine, trusting to be perfectly quieted by the nauseous draught; but when Mr. Powys came, she rushed up to him, and fell with a cry upon his breast, murmuring broken words that Georgiana might fairly interpret as her suspicions directed. Nor had she ever seen Merthyr look as he did when their eyes next met.
CHAPTER XXIX
The card of Mr. Powys found Arabella alone in the house. Mrs. Lupin was among village school-children; Mrs. Chump had gone to London to see whether anything was known of Mr. Pole at his office, where she fell upon the youth Braintop, and made him her own for the day. Adela was out in the woods, contemplating nature; and Cornelia was supposed to be walking whither her stately fancy drew her.
“Will you take long solitary walks unprotected?” she was asked.
“I have a parasol,” she replied; and could hear, miles distant, the domestic comments being made on her innocence; and the story it would be—“She thinks of no possible danger but from the sun.”
A little forcing of her innocence now was necessary as an opiate for her conscience. She was doing what her conscience could only pardon on the plea of her extreme innocence. The sisters, and the fashion at Brookfield, permitted the assumption, and exaggerated it willingly. It chanced, however, that Adela had reason to feel discontented. It was a breach of implied contract, she thought, that Cornelia should, as she did only yesterday, tell her that she had seen Edward Buxley in the woods, and that she was of opinion that the air of the woods was bad for her. Not to see would have been the sisterly obligation, in Adela’s idea—especially when seeing embraced things that no loving sister should believe.
Bear in mind that we are sentimentalists. The eye is our servant, not our master; and—so are the senses generally. We are not bound to accept more than we choose from them. Thus we obtain delicacy; and thus, as you will perceive, our civilization, by the aid of the sentimentalists, has achieved an effective varnish. There, certainly, to the vulgar, mind a tail is visible. The outrageous philosopher declares vehemently that no beast of the field or the forest would own such a tail. (His meaning is, that he discerns the sign of the animal slinking under the garb of the stately polished creature. I have all the difficulty in the world to keep him back and let me pursue my course.) These philosophers are a bad-mannered body. Either in opposition, or in the support of them, I maintain simply that the blinking sentimentalist helps to make civilization what it is, and civilization has a great deal of merit.
“Did you not leave your parasol behind you at Ipley?” said Adela, as she met Cornelia in the afternoon.
Cornelia coloured. Her pride supported her, and she violated fine shades painfully in her response: “Mr. Barrett left me there. Is that your meaning?”
Adela was too much shocked to note the courageousness of the reply. “Well! if all we do is to come into broad daylight!” was her horrified mental ejaculation.
The veil of life was about to be lifted for these ladies. They found Arabella in her room, crying like an unchastened school-girl; and their first idea was one of intense condemnation—fresh offences on the part of Mrs. Chump being conjectured. Little by little Arabella sobbed out what she had heard that day from Mr. Powys.
After the first stupor Adela proposed to go to her father instantly, and then suggested that they should all go. She continued talking in random suggestions, and with singular heat, as if she conceived that the sensibility of her sisters required to be aroused. By moving and acting, it seemed to her that the prospect of a vast misery might be expunged, and that she might escape from showing any likeness to Arabella’s shamefully-discoloured face. It was impossible for her to realize grief in her own bosom. She walked the room in a nervous tremour, shedding a note of sympathy to one sister and to the other. At last Arabella got fuller command of her voice. When she had related that her father’s positive wish, furthered by the doctor’s special injunction to obey it scrupulously, was that they were not to go to him in London, and not to breathe a word of his illness, but to remain at Brookfield entertaining friends, Adela stamped her foot, saying that it was more than human nature could bear.
“If we go,” said Arabella, “the London doctor assured Mr. Powys that he would not answer for papa’s life.”
“But, good heavens! are we papa’s enemies? And why may Mr. Powys see him if we, his daughters, cannot? Tell me how Mr. Powys met him and knew of it! Tell me—I am bewildered. I feel that we are cheated in some way. Oh! tell me something clear.”
Arabella said calmingly: “Emilia is with papa. She wrote to Mr. Powys. Whether she did rightly or not we have not now to inquire. I believe that she thought it right.”
“Entertain friends!” interjected Adela. “But papa cannot possibly mean that we are to go through—to—the fete on Besworth Lawn, Bella! It’s in two days from this dreadful day.”
“Papa has mentioned it to Mr. Powys; he desires us not to postpone it. We…” Arabella’s voice broke piteously.
“Oh! but this is torture!” cried Adela, with a deplorable vision of the looking-glass rising before her, as she felt the tears sting her eyelids. “This cannot be! No father would…not loving us as dear papa does! To be quiet! to sit and be gay! to flaunt at a fete! Oh, mercy! mercy! Tell me—he left us quite well—no one could have guessed. I remember he looked at me from the carriage window. Tell me—it must be some moral shock—what do you attribute it to? Wilfrid cannot be the guilty one. We have been only too compliant to papa’s wishes about that woman. Tell me what you think it can be!”
A voice said, “Money!”
Which of the sisters had spoken Adela did not know. It was bitter enough that one could be brought to utter the thing, even if her ideas were so base as to suspect it. The tears now came dancing over her under-lids like triumphing imps. “Money!” echoed through her again and again. Curiously, too, she had no occasion to ask how it was that money might be supposed to have operated on her father’s health. Unable to realize to herself the image of her father lying ill and suffering, but just sufficiently touched by what she could conceive of his situation, the bare whisper of money came like a foul insult to overwhelm her in floods of liquid self-love. She wept with that last anguish of a woman who is compelled to weep, but is incapable of finding any enjoyment in her tears. Cornelia and Arabella caught her hands; she was the youngest, and had been their pet. It gratified them that Adela should show a deep and keen feeling. Adela did not check herself from a demonstration that enabled her to look broadly, as it were, on her own tenderness of heart. Following many outbursts, she asked, “And the illness—what is it? not its cause—itself!”
A voice said, “Paralysis!”
Adela’s tears stopped. She gazed on both faces, trying with open mouth to form the word.
CHAPTER XXX
Flying from port to port to effect an exchange of stewards (the endless occupation of a yacht proprietor), Wilfrid had no tidings from Brookfield. The night before the gathering on Besworth Lawn he went to London and dined at his Club—a place where youths may drink largely of the milk of this world’s wisdom. Wilfrid’s romantic sentiment was always corrected by an hour at his Club. After dinner he strolled to a not perfectly regulated theatre, in company with a brother officer; and when they had done duty before the scenes for a space of time, they lounged behind to disenchant themselves, in obedience to that precocious cynicism which is the young man’s extra-Luxury. The first figure that caught Wilfrid’s attention there was Mr. Pericles, in a white overcoat, stretched along a sofa—his eyelids being down, though his eyes were evidently vigilant beneath. A titter of ladies present told of some recent interesting commotion.
“Only a row between that rich Greek fellow who gave the supper, and Marion,” a vivacious dame explained to Wilfrid. “She’s in one of her jealous fits; she’d be jealous if her poodle-dog went on its hind-legs to anybody else.”
“Poodle, by Jove!” said Wilfrid. “Pericles himself looks like an elongated poodle shaved up to his moustache. Look at him. And he plays the tyrant, does he?”
“Oh! she stands that. Some of those absurd women like it, I think. She’s fussing about another girl.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“What man’s worth it?”
“But, would you?”
“It depends upon the ‘him,’ monsieur.
“Depends upon his being very handsome!”
“And good.”
“And rich?”
“No!” the lady fired up. “There you don’t know us.”
The colloquy became almost tender, until she said, “Isn’t this gassy, and stifling? I confess I do like a carriage, and Richmond on a Sunday. And then, with two daughters, you know! But what I complain of is her folly in being in love, or something like it, with a rich fellow.”
“Love the poor devil—manage the rich, you mean.”
“Yes, of course; that makes them both happy.”
“It’s a method of being charitable to two.”
A rather fleshy fairy now entered, and walked straight up to the looking-glass to examine her paint—pronouncedly turning her back to the sofa, where Mr. Pericles still lay at provoking full length. Her panting was ominous of a further explosion.
“Innocent child!” in the mockery of a foreign accent, commenced it; while Wilfrid thought how unjustly and coldly critically he had accused his little Emilia of vulgarity, now that he had this feminine display of it swarming about him.
“Innocent child, indeed! Be as deaf as you like, you shall hear. And sofas are not made for men’s dirty boots, in this country. I believe they’re all pigs abroad—the men; and the women—cats! Oh! don’t open your eyes—don’t speak, pray. You’re certain I must go when the bell rings. You’re waiting for that, you unmanly dog!”
“A pig,” Mr. Pericles here ventured to remind her, murmuring as one in a dream.
“A peeg!” she retorted mildly, somewhat mollified by her apparent success. But Mr. Pericles had relapsed into his exasperating composure. The breath of a deliberate and undeserved peacefulness continued to be drawn in by his nostrils.
At the accustomed warning there was an ostentatious rustle of retiring dresses; whereat Mr. Pericles chose to proclaim himself awake. The astute fairy-fury immediately stepped before him.
“Now you can’t go on pretending sleep. You shall hear, and everybody shall hear. You know you’re a villain! You’re a wolf seeking…”
Mr. Pericles waved his hand, and she was caught by the wrist and told that the scene awaited her.
“Let them wait!” she shouted, and, sharpening her cry as she was dragged off, “Dare to take that girl to Italy! I know what that means, with you. An Englishman might mean right—but you! You think you’ve been dealing with a fool! Why, I can stop this in a minute, and I will. It’s you’re the fool! Why, I know her father: he plays in the orchestra. I know her name—Belloni!”
Up sprang the Greek like a galvanized corpse; while two violent jerks from the man hauling her out rattled the laugh of triumph which burst from her. At the same time Wilfrid strove forward, with the frown of one still bent listening, and he and Pericles were face to face. The eyebrows of the latter shot up in a lively arch. He made a motion toward the ceremony of ‘shake-hands;’ but, perceiving no correspondent overture, grinned, “It is warm—ha?”
“You feel the heat? Step outside a minute,” said Wilfrid.
“Oh, no!” Mr. Pericles looked pleasantly sagacious. “Ze draught—a cold.”
“Will you come?” pursued Wilfrid.
“Many sanks!”
Wilfrid’s hand was rising. At this juncture his brother officer slipped out some languid words in his ear, indicative of his astonishment that he should be championing a termagant, and horror at the idea of such a thing being publicly imagined, tamed Wilfrid quickly. He recovered himself with his usual cleverness. Seeing the signs of hostility vanish, Mr. Pericles said, “You are on a search for your father? You have found him? Hom! I should say a maladie of nerfs will come to him. A pin fall—he start! A storm at night—he is out dancing among his ships of venture! Not a bid of corage!—which is bad. If you shall find Mr. Pole for to-morrow on ze lawn, vary glad.”
With a smile compounded of sniffing dog and Parisian obsequiousness, Mr. Pericles passed, thinking “He has not got her:” for such was his deduction if he saw that a man could flush for a woman’s name.
Wilfrid stood like a machine with a thousand wheels in revolt. Sensations pricked at ideas, and immediately left them to account for their existence as they best could. The ideas committed suicide without a second’s consideration. He felt the great gurgling sea in which they were drowned heave and throb. Then came a fresh set, that poised better on the slack-rope of his understanding. By degrees, a buried dread in his brain threw off its shroud. The thought that there was something wrong with his father stood clearly over him, to be swallowed at once in the less tangible belief that a harm had come to Emilia—not was coming, but had come. Passion thinks wilfully when it thinks at all. That night he lay in a deep anguish, revolving the means by which he might help and protect her. There seemed no way open, save by making her his own; and did he belong to himself? What bound him to Lady Charlotte? She was not lovely or loving. He had not even kissed her hand; yet she held him in a chain.
The two men composing most of us at the outset of actual life began their deadly wrestle within him, both having become awakened. If they wait for circumstance, that steady fire will fuse them into one, who is commonly a person of some strength; but throttling is the custom between them, and we are used to see men of murdered halves. These men have what they fought for: they are unaware of any guilt that may be charged against them, though they know that they do not embrace Life; and so it is that we have vague discontent too universal. Change, O Lawgiver! the length of our minority, and let it not end till this battle is thoroughly fought out in approving daylight. The period of our duality should be one as irresponsible in your eyes as that of our infancy. Is he we call a young man an individual—who is a pair of alternately kicking scales? Is he educated, when he dreams not that he is divided? He has drunk Latin like a vital air, and can quote what he remembers of Homer; but how has he been fortified for this tremendous conflict of opening manhood, which is to our life here what is the landing of a soul to the life to come?
Meantime, it is a bad business when the double-man goes about kneeling at the feet of more than one lady. Society (to give that institution its due) permits him to seek partial invulnerability by dipping himself in a dirty Styx, which corrects, as we hear said, the adolescent tendency to folly. Wilfrid’s sentiment had served him (well or ill as it may be), by keeping him from a headlong plunge in the protecting river; and his folly was unchastened. He did not even contemplate an escape from the net at Emilia’s expense. The idea came. The idea will come to a young man in such a difficulty. “My mistress! My glorious stolen fruit! My dark angel of love!” He deserves a little credit for seeing that Emilia never could be his mistress, in the debased sense of the term. Union with her meant life-long union, he knew. Ultimate mental subjection he may also have seen in it, unconsciously. For, hazy thoughts of that nature may mix with the belief that an alliance with her degrades us, in this curious hotch-potch of emotions known to the world as youthful man. A wife superior to her husband makes him ridiculous wilfully, if the wretch is to be laughed at; but a mistress thus ill-matched cannot fail to cast the absurdest light on her monstrous dwarf-custodian. Wilfrid had the sagacity to perceive, and the keen apprehension of ridicule to shrink from, the picture. Besides, he was beginning to love Emilia. His struggle now was to pluck his passion from his heart; and such was already his plight that he saw no other way of attempting it than by taking horse and riding furiously in the direction of Besworth.
CHAPTER XXXI
“I am curious to see what you will make of this gathering. I can cook a small company myself. It requires the powers of a giantess to mix a body of people in the open air; and all that is said of commanders of armies shall be said of you, if you succeed.”
This was Lady Gosstre’s encouragement to the fair presidents of the fete on Besworth Lawn. There had been a time when they would have cried out internally: “We will do it, fail who may.” That fallow hour was over. Their sole thought was to get through the day. A little feverish impulse of rivalry with her great pattern may have moved Arabella; but the pressure of grief and dread, and the contrast between her actions and feelings, forcibly restrained a vain display. As a consequence, she did her duty better, and won applause from the great lady’s moveable court on eminences of the ground.
“These girls are clever,” she said to Lady Charlotte. “They don’t bustle too much. They don’t make too distinct a difference of tone with the different sets. I shall propose Miss Pole as secretary to our Pin and Needle Relief Society.”
“Do,” was the reply. “There is also the Polish Dance Committee; and, if she has any energy left, she might be treasurer to the Ladies’ General Revolution Ball.”
“That is an association with which I am not acquainted,” said Lady Gosstre, directing her eye-glass on the field. “Here comes young Pole. He’s gallant, they tell me, and handsome: he studies us too obviously. That’s a mistake to be corrected, Charlotte. One doesn’t like to see a pair of eyes measuring us against a preconception quelconque. Now, there is our Ionian Am…but you have corrected me, Merthyr:—host, if you please. But, see! What is the man doing? Is he smitten with madness?”
Mr. Pericles had made a furious dash at the band in the centre of the lawn, scattered their music, and knocked over the stands. When his gesticulations had been observed for some moments, Freshfield Sumner said: “He has the look of a plucked hen, who remembers that she once clapped wings, and tries to recover the practice.”
“Very good,” said Lady Gosstre. She was not one who could be unkind to the professional wit. “And the music-leaves go for feathers. What has the band done to displease him? I thought the playing was good.”
“The instruments appear to have received a dismissal,” said Lady Charlotte. “I suppose this is a clearing of the stage for coming alarums and excursions. Behold! the ‘female element’ is agitated. There are—can you reckon at this distance, Merthyr?—twelve, fourteen of my sex entreating him in the best tragic fashion. Can he continue stern?”
“They seem to be as violent as the women who tore up Orpheus,” said Lady Gosstre.
Tracy Runningbrook shrieked, in a paroxysm, “Splendid!” from his couch on the sward, and immediately ran off with the idea, bodily.
“Have I stumbled anywhere?” Lady Gosstre leaned to Mr. Powys.
He replied with a satiric sententiousness that told Lady Gosstre what she wanted to know.
“This is the isolated case where a little knowledge is truly dangerous,” said Lady Gosstre. “I prohibit girls from any allusion to the classics until they have taken their degree and are warranted not to open the wrong doors. On the whole, don’t you think, Merthyr, it’s better for women to avoid that pool?”
“And accept what the noble creature chooses to bring to us in buckets,” added Lady Charlotte. “What is your opinion, Georgey? I forget: Merthyr has thought you worthy of instruction.”
“Merthyr taught me in camp,” said Georgians, looking at her brother—her face showing peace and that confirmed calm delight habitual to it. “We found that there are times in war when you can do nothing, and you are feverish to be employed. Then, if you can bring your mind to study, you are sure to learn quickly. I liked nothing better than Latin Grammar.”
“Studying Latin Grammar to the tune of great guns must be a new sensation,” Freshfield Sumner observed.
“The pleasure is in getting rid of all sensation,” said she. “I mean you command it without at all crushing your excitement. You cannot feel a fuller happiness than when you look back on those hours: at least, I speak for myself.”
“So,” said Lady Gosstre, “Georgey did not waste her time after all, Charlotte.”
What the latter thought was: “She could not handle a sword or fire a pistol. Would I have consented to be mere camp-baggage?” Yet no woman admired Georgiana Ford so much. Disappointment vitiated many of Lady Charlotte’s first impulses; and not until strong antagonism had thrown her upon her generosity could she do justice to the finer natures about her. There was full life in her veins; and she was hearing the thirty fatal bells that should be music to a woman, if melancholy music; and she had not lived. Time, that sounded in her ears, as it kindled no past, spoke of no future. She was in unceasing rivalry with all of her sex who had a passion, or a fixed affection, or even an employment. A sense that she was wronged by her fate haunted this lady. Rivalry on behalf of a man she would have held mean—she would have plucked it from her bosom at once. She was simply envious of those who in the face of death could say, “I have lived.” Pride, and the absence of any power of self-inspection, kept her blind to her disease. No recollection gave her boy save of the hours in the hunting-field. There she led gallantly; but it was not because of leading that she exulted. There the quick blood struck on her brain like wine, and she seemed for a time to have some one among the crowns of life. An object—who cared how small?—was ahead: a poor old fox trying to save his brush; and Charlotte would have it if the master of cunning did not beat her. “It’s my natural thirst for blood,” she said. She did not laugh as she thought now and then that the old red brush dragging over grey dews toward a yellow yolk in the curdled winter-morning sky, was the single thing that could make her heart throb.
Brookfield was supported in its trial by the discomfiture of the Tinleys. These girls, with their brother, had evidently plotted to ‘draw out’ Mrs. Chump. They had asked concerning her, severally; and hearing that she had not returned from town, had each shown a blank face, or had been doubtful of the next syllable. Of Wilfrid, Emilia, and Mr. Pole, question and answer were interchanged. “Wilfrid will come in a few minutes. Miss Belloni, you know, is preparing for Italy. Papa? Papa, I really do fear will not be able to join us.” Such was Brookfield’s concerted form of reply. The use of it, together with the gaiety of dancing blood, gave Adela (who believed that she ought to be weeping, and could have wept easily) strange twitches of what I would ask permission to call the juvenile ‘shrug-philosophy.’ As thus: ‘What creatures we are, but life is so!’ And again, ‘Is not merriment dreadful when a duty!’ She was as miserable as she could be but not knowing that youth furnished a plea available, the girl was ashamed of being cheerful at all. Edward Burley’s sketch of Mr. Pericles scattering his band, sent her into muffled screams of laughter; for which she did internal penance so bitter that, for her to be able to go on at all, the shrug-philosophy was positively necessary; Mr. Pericles himself saw the sketch, and remarked critically, “It is zat I have more hair:” following which, he tapped the signal for an overture to commence, and at the first stroke took a run, with his elbows clapping exactly as the shrewd hand of Edward had drawn him.
“See him—zat fellow,” Mr. Pericles said to Laura Tinley, pointing to the leader. “See him pose a maestro! zat leads zis tintamarre. He is a hum-a-bug!”
Laura did the vocal caricaturing, when she had gathered plenty of matter of this kind. Altogether, as host, Mr. Pericles accomplished his duty in furnishing amusement.
Late in the afternoon, Sir Twickenham Pryme and Wilfrid arrived in company. The baronet went straight to Cornelia. Wilfrid beckoned to Adela, from whom he heard of his father’s illness at the hotel in town, and the conditions imposed on them. He nodded, said lightly, “Where’s Emilia?” and nodded again to the answer, “With papa,” and then stopped as he was walking off to one of the groups. “After all, it won’t do for us to listen to the whims of an invalid. I’m going back. You needn’t say you’ve seen me.”
“We have the doctor’s most imperative injunction, dearest,” pleaded Adela, deceived for a moment. “Papa’s illness is mental chiefly. He is able to rise and will be here very soon, if he is not in any way crossed. For heaven’s sake, command yourself as we have done—painfully indeed! Besides, you have been seen.”
“Has she—?” Wilfrid began; and toned an additional carelessness. “She writes, of course?”
“No, not once; and we are angry with her. It looks like ingratitude, or stupidity. She can write.”
“People might say that we are not behaving well,” returned Wilfrid, repeating that he must go to town. But now Edward Burley camp running with a message from the aristocratic heights, and thither Wilfrid walked captive—saying in Adela’s ear, “Don’t be angry with her.”
Adela thought, very justly, “I shall, if you’ve been making a fool of her, naughty boy!”
Wilfrid saluted the ladies, and made his bow of introduction to Georgiana Ford, at whom he looked twice, to confirm an impression that she was the perfect contrast to Emilia; and for this reason he chose not to look at her again. Lady Charlotte dropped him a quick recognition.
If Brookfield could have thrown the burden from its mind, the day was one to feel a pride in. Three Circles were present, and Brookfield denominated two that it had passed through, and patronized all—from Lady Gosstre (aristocracy) to the Tinley set (lucre), and from these to the representative Sumner girls (cultivated poverty). There were also intellectual, scientific, and Art circles to deal with; music, pleasant to hear, albeit condemned by Mr. Pericles; agreeable chatter, courtly flirtation and homage, and no dread of the defection of the letter H from their family.
“I feel more and more convinced,” said Adela, meeting Arabella, “that we can have really no cause for alarm; otherwise papa would not have been cruel to his children.” Arabella kindly reserved her opinion. “So let us try and be happy,” continued Adela, determining to be encouraged by silence. With that she went on tiptoe gracefully and blew a kiss to her sister’s lips. Running to Captain Gambier, she said, “Do you really enjoy this?”
“Charming,” replied the ever-affable gentleman. “If I might only venture to say what makes it so infinitely!”
Much to her immediate chagrin at missing a direct compliment, which would have had to be parried, and might have led to ‘vistas,’ the too sprightly young lady found herself running on: “It’s as nice as sin, without the knowledge that you are sinning.”
“Oh! do you think that part of it disagreeable?” said the captain.
“I think the heat terrific:” she retrieved her ground.
“Coquet et coquette,” muttered Lady Charlotte, observing them from a distance; and wondered whether her sex might be strongly represented in this encounter.
It was not in the best taste, nor was it perhaps good policy (if I may quote the Tinley set), for the ladies of Brookfield to subscribe openly to the right of certain people present to be exclusive. Arabella would have answered: “Lady Gosstre and her party cannot associate with you to your mutual pleasure and profit; and do you therefore blame her for not attempting what would fail ludicrously?” With herself, as she was not sorry to show, Lady Gosstre could associate. Cornelia had given up work to become a part of the Court. Adela made flying excursions over the lawn. Laura Tinley had the field below and Mr. Pericles to herself. That anxious gentleman consulted his watch from time to time, as if he expected the birth of an event.
