Fanny looked at her strangely for some moments, and then said:
“I do not blame you, dear; for I am myself of the same way of thinking: I cannot realize what the padre told us. I cannot think of myself as the Fanny Burney whose book is keeping Sir Joshua out of his bed. That is why I kept on harping like a fool on the single string of that odious party. I feel that I must keep on talking, lest my poor brain should give way when I sit down to think if I am really Fanny Burney, who was ever happiest sitting unnoticed in a corner when people came to this house, or laughing with you all up here. I cannot think how it would be possible for me to write a book that could be read by such as Sir Joshua.”
“Better think nothing more about it,” said Susy, who fancied she saw a strange look in Fanny’s eyes. “What’s the good of brooding over the matter? There’s nothing strange about Sir Joshua’s reading the book: I read it and I told you that it was so lovely everybody would want to read it. Besides, Sir Joshua may only have mentioned it for want of a better excuse to leave the club early; so you may not be so famous after all, Fanny.”
Susy’s well-meant attempt to restore her threatened equilibrium was too much for Fanny. But there was a considerable interval before her laughter came. She put an arm about Susy, saying:
“You have spoken the truth, my dear sister. I have no right to give myself airs until we find out exactly how we stand. But if Fanny Burney, the dunce, should find out to-morrow that Sir Joshua has not really been kept out of his bed in order to read ‘Evelina’ by Fanny Burney, the writer, the first Fanny will feel dreadfully mortified.”
“One thing I can promise you,” said Susy, “and this is that Susannah Burney will not be kept out of her bed any longer talking to Fanny Burney about Fanny Burney’s novel, whether Fanny Burney be mortified or not. We shall know all about the matter when we go to the Reynolds’s to-morrow. In the meantime, I hope to have some hours of sleep, though I daresay that Fanny Burney will lie awake as a proper authoress should do, thinking over the exciting party in the Poultry and wondering how she will work in a description of it in her next novel. Good-night, and pleasant dreams! Come along, Lottie.”
And Fanny Burney did just what her sister had predicted she would do. She recalled some of the incidents of the tea-party in the Poultry, having before her, not as she had in the hackney coach, the possibility of describing them in a letter to Mr. Crisp, but of introducing them into a new book.
Before she slept she had made up her mind to begin a new book; for she now found it comparatively easy to believe that Sir Joshua was reading “Evelina” with great interest. At any rate, she would hear the next day when she should go to the Reynolds’s, whether Sir Joshua had read it, or whether he had only made it an excuse for getting home early in the night, so that he might arise early and refreshed to resume his painting of the duchesses.
But the next evening, when, with her sisters and their stepmother she tripped along the hundred yards or so of Leicester Fields that lay between their house and that of Sir Joshua Reynolds, all thoughts of the book which she had written and of the book which she meant to write, vanished the moment that she was close enough to Sir Joshua’s to hear, with any measure of clearness, the nature of the singing, the sound of which fell gently upon her ears.
“H’sh!” said Mrs. Burney, stopping a few feet from the door. “H’sh! some one is singing. I did not know that it was to be a musical party.”