What! Sir Joshua was not only reading it, but he had curtailed his stay at the club in order to get home to continue it! Sir Joshua had actually been content to forsake the society of his brilliant friends, every one of them more or less notable in the world, in order that he might read the story which Fanny Burney had written all out of her own head!
The idea was simply astounding to the girls and to Fanny herself as well. It meant fame, they were assured, and they were right. It took such a hold upon Susy and Lottie as prevented them from giving any attention to Fanny’s amusing account of the evening at the Barlowes’; and the fun she made—modelled on Mr. Garrick’s best nursery style—of the Alderman and Mrs. Alderman, with the speeches of the one and the St. Giles’s curtsies of the other, went for quite as little as did her imitation of the bobbing of the crown feathers of the aunts and the rustling of their dresses, the material of which was too expensive to be manageable: the thick silk was, Fanny said, like a valuable horse, impatient of control. She showed how it stood round them in massive folds when they curtsied, refusing to respond to the many kicks they dealt it to keep it in its place.
From the recalcitrant silks—with illustrations—Fanny had gone to the slicing of the ham, the hacking at the great sirloin, the clatter of the teacups, and the never-ending passing of plates and pickles, of mustard and pepper and salt—the things were moving round the table as the planets were shown circling round the sun in the clever invention called the Orrery, after one of the titles of the Earl of Cork—only the noise made by the perpetual handing on of the things did not suggest the music of the spheres, Fanny said.
Her descriptions, bright though they were and full of apt metaphors, went for nothing. Her sisters were too full of that wonderful thing which had happened—the great Sir Joshua Reynolds, President of the Royal Academy, the painter of all the most beautiful duchesses that were in the world, to say nothing of beautiful ladies of less exalted rank—this great man, who was so busy conferring immortality upon duchesses that he was compelled to keep in his painting-room on Sundays as well as every other day, and who had never been known to suspend his work except upon the occasion of the death of his dear friend Dr. Goldsmith—this man was actually at that very moment sitting in his arm-chair eagerly reading the words which their sister Fanny had written!
The thought was too wonderful for them. The effect that it had on them was to make them feel that they had two sisters in Fanny, the one a pleasant, homely, hem-stitching girl, who could dance the Nancy Dawson jig for them and take off all the people whom she met and thought worth taking off; the other a grave authoress, capable of writing books that great men forsook the society of other great men to read!
They looked on her now with something of awe in their eyes, and it was this lens of awe which, while magnifying her work as a writer where it came into their focus, made them fail to appreciate her fun, for they saw it, as it were, through the edges of the lens and not through the centre.
She quickly perceived the lack of sympathy of her audience.
“What is the matter with you both to-night?” she cried—they were now upstairs in her room, and she knew that at the same moment Mrs. Burney was giving her husband an account of the party. “What is the matter with you both? Has anything happened when I was away to put you out? Why don’t you laugh as usual? I am sure I never told you anything half so funny as this, and I was thinking all the way coming home that it would make you roar, and now you sit gravely looking at me and not taking in half I say. Pray, what is the matter?”
“Nothing is the matter, dear,” said Lottie. “Nothing—only I can’t help thinking that Sir Joshua is at this moment sitting eagerly reading the book that you wrote—you, sister Fanny, that no one who comes to us notices particularly. I can hardly bring myself to believe that there is only one Fanny.”