“Ah, sir,” said she, “you are, I perceive, like the rest of your sex: you confound the effect of a new gown with that of an attractive face. You mix up a woman with her dress until you don’t know which is which. Mr. Gainsborough knows the difference. Ask him to paint me. ‘I will hang her brocade on a wig-stand and that will be enough for most critics,’ he will answer. They say that the Duchess of Devonshire has induced him to paint her hat, and to eke out what little space remains on the canvas with her grace’s brocade. Oh, Mr. Gainsborough is the only man who knows the woman from her dress!”
“Madam,” said Dick, who had been whetting his wits all the time she had been speaking, “madam, when I look at Mrs. Abington it is revealed to me that a beautiful woman is a poem; her dress is merely the music to which the poem is set.”
She did not sink in a courtesy at the compliment; most women would have done so, therefore Mrs. Abington refrained. She only gave an extra tilt of an inch or thereabouts to her stately head, and allowed her fan to droop forward until it was pointing with an expression of exquisite roguishness at the young man’s face.
”’Tis a pretty conceit, i’ faith, Dick,” said she, “and its greatest charm lies in its adaptability to so many women. A song! quite true: we have both seen women who were the merest doggerel; and as for the music—oh, lud! I have seen women dress so that it would need a whole orchestra to do them justice. For my own part, I aim no higher than the compass of a harpsichord; and I hold that one whose garments suggest a band is unfit for a private room. Music! I have seen women apparelled in a flourish of trumpets, and others diaphanously draped in the thin tones of a flute.”
“’Twas a happy conceit that crossed my mind, since it has opened a vein of such wit,” said Dick. “But pray, my dear madam, tell us how it is that Bath is blest.”
“Bath blest! ’Tis the first I heard of it.”
“Since Mrs. Abington has come hither. How is it possible that you have been able to forsake Mr. Colman and Covent Garden!”
“Mr. Colman is a curmudgeon, and Covent Garden is—not so far removed from Drury Lane.”
“That means that you are not in any of the pieces this week?”
“Nan Cattley has it all her own way just now. All that she needs to make her truly happy and to make Mr. Colman a bankrupt is to get rid of Mrs. Bulkley.”