Mrs. Burney allowed her to pass on to Fanny, having obtained her promise not to bother the girl—that was how Mrs. Burney framed the promise in her own mind—and Mrs. Barlowe kept faith with her, and even persuaded Alderman Kensit, who was approaching them slowly with a sheaf of notes in his hand, to defer their delivery in the form of a speech until the young woman had gone.
And thus the visitors from St. Martin’s Street were able to escape going through the formality of taking leave of all the party. They shook hands only with their host and hostess and their son, curtseying very politely to the company of relations.
“They are warm-hearted people, but their weakness for ceremony and the like is foolish enough,” said Mrs. Burney to Fanny, when they were safe within the hackney carriage.
Fanny laughed.
“Oh, indeed, there is no harm in any of them,” she said. “They may be a little foolish in thinking that the Poultry is St. James’s Palace or Buckingham House. The only one among them who is an arrant fool is the son. You saw how his mother made it up that he should lead me into the other room?”
“It was maladroitly done indeed. What had he to say to you when he got you there, I wonder?”
“He had nothing to say to me except that his uncles were second in all the virtues and all the talents to no man in town, and that his aunts and cousins—but he did not get so far in his praise of his aunts and cousins; I fled. Oh, did you see him cut slices off the ham?”
Fanny laughed quite pleasantly, with a consciousness of having at her command the material on which to found a scene that would set her sisters shrieking.
“Oh, if Mr. Garrick had but seen him carve that ham!” she cried.