"Well, mamma, you will be rewarded this time for obeying my commands like a dutiful mother, and permitting me to make a pet of this sweet Agnes.... There is nothing in the Barnaby style here.... I was sure Miss Compton, of Compton Basett, must be good for something," said Mary.
"If I may venture to hope, as I think I may," replied her mother, "that she will never be the means of bringing me in contact with my incomparable sister-in-law again, I may really thank you, saucy girl as you are, for having so taken the reins into your own hands. I delight in this Miss Compton. There is a racy originality about her that is very awakening. And as for your Agnes, what with her new young happiness, her graceful loveliness, now first seen to some advantage, her proud and pretty fondness for her aunt, and her natural joy at seeing us all again under circumstances so delightfully altered, I really do think she is the most enchanting creature I ever beheld."
CHAPTER XII.
A PARTY.—A MEETING.—GOOD SOMETIMES PRODUCTIVE OF EVIL.
The superintending the toilet of Agnes for the party of that evening was a new and very delightful page in the history of the spinster of Compton Basett. The fondest mother dressing a fair daughter for her first presentation, never watched the operations of the toilet more anxiously; and in her case there was a sort of personal triumph attending its success, that combined the joy of the accomplished artist, who sees the finished loveliness himself has made with the fond approval of affection.
Partly from her own native good taste, and partly from the wisdom of listening with a very discriminating judgment to the practical counsels of an experienced modiste, the dress of Agnes was exactly what it ought to have been; and the proud old lady herself could not have desired an appearance more distinguée than that of her adopted child when, turning from Peggy and her mirror, she made her a sportive courtesy and exclaimed,—
"Have you not made a fine lady of me, aunt Betsy?"
When Miss Compton's carriage stopped at Rodney Place, it was Mrs. Peters, instead of her daughter, who took a place in it.
"Mary is excessively angry with me," said she, as they drove off, "for not letting her be your companion; but I think it more comme il faut, Agnes, that I should present you to Mrs. Pemberton myself. She is a vastly fine lady; ... not one of us humble Bristolian Cliftonites, who pique ourselves rather upon the elevation of our lime-stone rock above the level of the stream that laves our merchants' quays, than on any other species of superiority that we can lay claim to. Mrs. Pemberton is none of us.... She has a house in London and a park in Buckinghamshire, and flies over the Continent every now and then with first-rate aristocratical velocity; but she has one feeling, sometimes shared by more ordinary mortals, which is a prodigious love of music. This, and a sort of besoin, to which she pleads guilty, of holding a salon every evening that she is not from home, forces upon her, as I take it, the necessity of visiting many of us who might elsewhere scarcely be deemed worthy to approach her foot-stool. We met her at the Parslowes, where the girls' performances elicited a very gracious degree of approbation. An introduction followed; she has honoured me by attending a concert at my own house, and this is the fourth evening we have passed with her. Now you have the carte du pays, and I think you will agree with me, that it is much better I should make my entrée with you on my arm, than permit you to follow with the damsels in my train."