“I am revenged,” thought Mrs. Woffington, with a little feminine smirk.
“I will be revenged,” vowed Pomander, clinching his teeth.
CHAPTER VII.
COMPARE a November day with a May day. They are not more unlike than a beautiful woman in company with a man she is indifferent to or averse, and the same woman with the man of her heart by her side.
At sight of Mr. Vane, all her coldness and nonchalance gave way to a gentle complacency; and when she spoke to him, her voice, so clear and cutting in the late assaut d'armes, sank of its own accord into the most tender, delicious tone imaginable.
Mr. Vane and she made love. He pleased her, and she desired to please him. My reader knows her wit, her finesse, her fluency; but he cannot conceive how god-like was her way of making love. I can put a few of the corpses of her words upon paper, but where are the heavenly tones—now calm and convincing, now soft and melancholy, now thrilling with tenderness, now glowing with the fiery eloquence of passion? She told him that she knew the map of his face; that for some days past he had been subject to an influence adverse to her. She begged him, calmly, for his own sake, to distrust false friends, and judge her by his own heart, eyes, and judgment. He promised her he would.
“And I do trust you, in spite of them all,” said he; “for your face is the shrine of sincerity and candor. I alone know you.”
Then she prayed him to observe the heartlessness of his sex, and to say whether she had done ill to hide the riches of her heart from the cold and shallow, and to keep them all for one honest man, “who will be my friend, I hope,” said she, “as well as my lover.”
“Ah!” said Vane, “that is my ambition.”