"Not yet; not till we go to take off our bonnets. I like this light, it is so pleasant to the eyes."
"Yes, and so cheap too," replied her husband. "But I wonder you should like this sort of light, Fanny, for you are far removed yet from that period of life when le petit jour is so favourable to beauty: you are still young enough to bear the searching light of broad-eyed day, and so I trust are all the ladies present; though I must own a veil is always a suspicious circumstance," he added, coming up to me.
"Yes, yes," said his wife, "I always suspect a veil is worn to conceal something."
"But it may be worn in mercy," he added; "and perhaps it is so here, if I may judge of what is hidden by what is shown: if I may form an opinion indeed from that hand and arm, on which youth and beauty are so legibly written, I—"
Here, confused and almost provoked, I drew on my gloves; and Mrs. Ridley, who loved fun, whispered her husband,
"Do not go on; she is quite ugly, scarred with the confluent small-pox, blear-eyed, and hideous: you will be surprised when you see her face."
She then begged to speak to me; and as I walked across the room in which we sat to join her in the next, I saw Ridley whisper Pendarves.
"May be so," he replied: "but her figure and form are almost the finest I ever saw."
"And yet I am so very tall," said I to myself with a joy that vibrated through my frame.
The conversation now became general; and on a lady's being mentioned who had married a second husband before the first had been dead quite a year, Pendarves, to my consternation, began a violent philippic against women, declaring that scarcely one of us was capable of a persevering attachment; that the best and dearest of husbands might be forgotten in six months; and that those men only could expect to be happy who laid their plans for happiness independently of woman's love.