James Dugdale had not been more than an hour at Chayleigh when he had read Hayes Meredith's letter. His return was unexpected, and he had been told by the servant who admitted him that the "ladies" were out. This was true, inasmuch as neither was in the house, but incorrect in so far as it seemed to imply that they were together.
Mrs. Carteret had departed in her pony-carriage, arrayed in handsome apparel, the materials and tints whereof were a clever combination of the requirements of the season then expiring and the season just about to begin, with a genteel recognition of the fact that an individual connected with the family had died within a period during which society would exact a costume commemorative of the circumstance. Mrs. Carteret had gone out, in high good humour with herself, and her dress, and her pony-carriage, with her smart servant, her pretty harness, her visiting-list, and the state of her complexion.
This latter was a subject of unusual self-gratulation, for Mrs. Carteret's complexion was changeable: it needed care, and, on the whole, it caused her more uneasiness, and occupied more of her attention, than any other mundane object. She was by no means a plain woman, and she had once been pretty--but her prettiness had been of a sunny, commonplace, exasperating, self-complacent kind; and now that it existed no longer, the expression of self-satisfaction was rather increased than lessened, for there was no delicacy of feature and no genuine bloom to divert attention from it.
If Mrs. Carteret believed anything firmly, it was that she was indisputably and incomparably the best, and very nearly the handsomest, of created beings; and she had a way of talking solemnly about her personal appearance,--taking careful note of its every peculiarity and variation, and bestowing upon it the minutest and most vexatious care,--which was annoying to her friends in general, and to James Dugdale in particular.
Mrs. Carteret was a woman who would be totally unmoved by any kind or degree of human suffering brought under her notice, but who would speak of a cold in her own head, or a pimple on her own face, as a calamity calculated to alarm and grieve the entire circle of her acquaintance. She was almost amusing in her transparent, engrossing, uncontrolled selfishness--amusing, that is, to strangers. It was not so pleasant to those who lived in the house or came into constant contact with her; they failed to perceive the humorous side of her character.
Her husband, who, with all his oddity and absence of mind, was not destitute of a degree of tact, in which there was a soupçon of cunning, and which he aired whenever there was any risk of his dearly-prized "quiet life" being endangered, had invented a kind of vocabulary of compliments of simulated solicitude and exaggerated sympathy, which was wonderfully efficacious, and really gave him very little trouble. To be sure he was rather apt to adhere to it with a parrot-like fidelity, and on her "pale days" to congratulate Mrs. Carteret on her bloom, and on her "dull days" to discover that it was difficult to leave her, she talked so charmingly--"but those new specimens must be seen to," &c. &c.
But these were mere casualties, and, as intense vanity is frequently accompanied by dense stupidity, they never endangered the good understanding between the husband--who was not nearly so tired of his wife as a more clever and practical man must inevitably have been--and the wife, whose wildest imaginings could never have extended to the possibility of any one's finding her less than perfectly admirable, or her husband otherwise than supremely enviable.
In the days when Mrs. Carteret had been pretty, her prettiness was of the corset-maker's model description, a prettiness which consisted in straight features, a high and well-defined colour, and a figure which required, and could bear, a good deal of tight-lacing.
Women did lace tightly in the golden prime of Mrs. Carteret's days, and she was not behindhand in that or any other fashion; indeed, she had a profound and almost religious respect for fashion, and she had, in consequence, a stiffness of figure suggestive of her being obliged to turn round "all at once" when it was necessary for her to turn at all, which gave her whole person an air and attitude of stiff and starched stupidity, highly provoking to an observer endowed with taste.
The paying of morning visits was an occupation especially congenial to Mrs. Carteret's taste, and well suited to her intellectual capacity, which answered freely to the demand made on it on such occasions. She was not by any means a vulgar gossip, but she possessed a satisfactory enough knowledge of the affairs and "ways" of all the "visitable" people within reach, and she found discussing them a very agreeable pastime.