“I have heard so—it is a profitable trade, I believe.”
“None more so. It is impossible to believe that a time will ever come when gold and silver lace will cease to be worn by gentlemen.”
“That would be an evil day for England as well as for Messieurs Barlowe, père et fils. But thank heaven it is not yet in sight. Good morning, dear sister; and be assured you have my thanks for your advice. But mind you, keep my little secret about the writing. Good-bye. You can face mother boldly, knowing that you have carried out her commission to the letter, and very neatly and discreetly into the bargain.”
“I would not have done so if her views had not been mine also; as for your writing—you may depend on my keeping your secret. But you will have to get the padre’s permission to have it printed—that’s something still in the far future, I suppose;”—and the elder sister stooped to kiss the younger—Fanny was not up to the shoulder of the beautiful and stately Esther.
And so they parted.
CHAPTER VIII
Fanny Burney had been forced, for the first time, to make her sister aware of the fact that she knew she was looked on as the dunce of the brilliant Burney family. She could see that her doing so had startled her sister, for neither Esther nor any of the other girls had ever suggested to her that they thought of her as being on a different level from themselves, though it was tacitly allowed that it was a great pity that Fanny did not emulate them in taking pains to shine as it was expected the children of that estimable master of music, Dr. Burney, should shine, so as to make the house in that narrow little street off Leicester Fields attractive to its many distinguished visitors.
Fanny had truly defined her place in the household. She had recognized her place for several years; but there was not the least suggestion of rancour in her tone when talking to her brilliant elder sister, for the simple reason that there was no bitterness in her heart against any member of the family for being cleverer than herself. Fanny took pride in the accomplishments of her sisters, and was quite content with her position in relation to them. She got on well with all of them, because she was fond of them all, and they were all fond of her. She had not rebelled when her father had sent her younger sisters to be educated in Paris, and had allowed her to pick up her own education as best she might in his own library; and it had been a great happiness to her to be allowed the privilege of copying out for the press the first volume of her father’s “History of Music.” It was her stepmother who, finding out that Fanny had what Mrs. Burney called “a taste for writing,” had suggested that that was the legitimate channel in which such a taste should flow; and it was her stepmother who had induced her to make a bonfire of all her own writings—the scribblings of her girlhood that represented the foolish errant flow of her “taste for writing”; and now and again she had a consciousness of her own duplicity in failing to resist the impulse that had come upon her to do some more of what her mother termed her “girlish scribbling.”