When all her company had departed, my Lady owned that she was tired, and Lydia was very plainly given to understand that she must not presume upon a relationship, which was, to say the least of it, ridiculous.
Lydia had made herself far finer than the bride, and Kitty thought it prodigious bad taste in her to be so ruffled and flounced and panniered.
“And the shade of lavender you’ve chosen, Lydia, positive sets my teeth on edge, and I should have thought you’d have known better than to rouge yourself up, till anyone would take my own woman for an actress, and a low one at that.”
“Well, then, I’m sure, your Ladyship,” retorted Lydia with spirit, “not having any acquaintance with such females, save your Ladyship’s own dear friend, my Lady Mandeville (who would have looked better for a bit of colour to-day), it wouldn’t become me to set myself up against your Ladyship’s opinion in the matter; but considering the practice I’ve had on your Ladyship it’s to be hoped I’d know how to put on the rouge, if I don’t show it off as well as your Ladyship, not being so full in the face. And I’m sorry your Ladyship ain’t satisfied with the hue of my gown, it being one of her own presents to me, Christmas five years that was. And indeed,” went on Lydia, “I never could abide it myself, but since it was when your Ladyship went sudden out of mourning for old Mr. Bellairs, and she didn’t know what to do with the eight yards of taffety, I couldn’t be so disobliging as not to make the best of them. And indeed, considering the occasion to-day I thought they fitted in uncommon apt.”
“Dear, to be sure!” cried Kitty, sinking into a chair. “What a tongue you have! ’Tis to be hoped it isn’t a family failing or else my poor dear Bellairs’s nephew, the last of his name, will have a sad time of it.”
“Dear, to be sure!” echoed Lydia, with frightful acrimony, “I could find it in my heart to pity that pore young gentleman myself. No one can ever say I wanted that there owdacious marriage.” (Which was certainly true. Lydia would infinitely have preferred to see her niece bloom unplucked on her maiden stem.) “Of all the unpleasant situations, I says, him to have a wife a milliner as is born to another class, and spend his days torn, so to speak, between the high and the low. He’ll never make a fine lady of Pamela, what’s a work-woman in the bone, and he can’t,” pursued Lydia, moved by her own eloquence almost to tears, “strip his own gentility off of himself like a coat and sit as it were in his shirt-sleeves, common, for the rest of his life.”
Seeing angry retort leaping in her mistress’s eye, Lydia proceeded in a great hurry, to get out the next most disagreeable remark she could think of: “And as to him being the last of his name, your Ladyship can’t go counting on that. Mrs. Jocelyn Bellairs,” Lydia tittered, “will have a long family like her mother before her, and before we know where we are we’ll have little Bellairses a-running about all over the place like spiders——”
She broke off. Intimately acquainted with her mistress as she was, there were sides to her character which Miss Lydia Pounce had as yet failed to grasp. She had thought to pay out my Lady for her odious unkindness, but her shaft had singularly missed the mark. All the ill-humour vanished from Kitty Kilcroney’s charming countenance. She clasped her hands with a genuine cry of delight.
“Why, Lydia, I’ll be godmother to the first girl, I will indeed! It ought to be a charming creature, they so handsome and so happy! I’ll be godmother, and ’twill be a vast of pleasure to me, child, to think there’ll be another Kitty Bellairs!”
The End