CHAPTER XIV.
IN SOCIETY.
“Ah! Then was it all spring weather?
Nay, but we were young and together.”
“Society is now one polished horde
Formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.”
One day at Durrus was very like another. By the time I had been there three weeks or a month, the days stretched out behind me into indefinite length, separating me more and more from my past life.
Looking back to that time, it seems to resolve itself into one long tête-à-tête with Willy. Quiet rides with him through the damp brown woods, or now and then a day with the Moycullen hounds; drives to return the visits of such of the natives as had called upon me; walks across the turf bog to where the old graveyard hangs over the sea, to watch the sun drop below the horizon. “Bound for America,” says Willy. “I wonder if you’d like to be going back with him?” I had no doubts in my own mind on the subject, though I did not feel called upon to say so to him. I was now quite certain that, in spite of various drawbacks, I enjoyed my life at Durrus very much.
I have said that I had had callers. After the O’Neills, among the first to come and see me were Mrs. Jackson-Croly and her daughters, and the Burkes, whose acquaintance I had already made.
These ladies all made their appearance on the same afternoon; but before the Burkes arrived I had an undiluted quarter of an hour of the Jackson-Crolys, during which time the magnificence of Mrs. Croly’s manner was only equalled by the fashionable languor of her daughters’. I naturally tried to talk to them of such local subjects as I knew anything about, but found that the meanest topic on which they would consent to converse was Dublin Castle, and the affability displayed to them by the lord-lieutenant—“left’nant,” they pronounced it—during the past season. With these lofty themes I was quite unfitted to grapple, and had sunk into a subordinate place in the conversation when the Miss Burkes were announced.
They were both exceedingly cordial and friendly, and Miss Mimi began almost immediately to rally me with ponderous facetiousness on my exploits on the day of the hunt.
“Oh, Miss Sarsfield! what’s this we hear about you and Mr. O’Neill? Springing away through the country after the fox, and leaving poor Willy in the ditch! Oh, fie!”
I feel that it is hopeless to convey any adequate idea of Miss Mimi’s voice by any system of spelling; but the fact that in her vocabulary “fie,” was pronounced “foy,” may serve as some indication of her manner of speech.