“I have finished,” she replied, with a stiff nod. “To be sure, ’twas my intention to express, in what I trust would be appropriate terms, our happiness in welcoming Miss Burney to our humble home; a few phrases of this sort were not thought out of place when I was young; but it appears that your father knows better what is comme il faut and haut ton than me. Bring the young lady forward, Thomas.”
The younger Thomas looked dubiously from his mother to his father. He was uncommonly like an actor who had forgotten his part, Fanny thought—he had no initiative. Fanny herself was more at home than any of the household. While the young man hesitated, she walked up the room as if she meant to present herself to the six figures that sat in a row at the farther end.
Thomas was beside her in a moment.
“I ask your pardon, Miss Burney,” he said. “But I knew that mamma had at least two more welcomes for your ear, and I feared that she had forgot them. Do not you think that mamma speaks well? Perhaps it would be unjust to judge her by what she said—she only made a beginning. You will be delighted when you are going away.”
Fanny felt that this prediction was certain to be realized.
“Yes, mamma’s good-byes are as well worded as her greetings,” he continued; “a clergyman could scarcely better them; and I hope—”
But now they were face to face with the six figures sitting in a row, and as his conversation was only designed as an accompaniment to the march of Fanny to this position, there was no reason to continue it.
The figures were of two men and four ladies. The former were middle-aged and bore an expression of gravity that a judge might have envied. Their dress was sombre, but of the finest material possible to buy, and each of them was painfully conscious of being in unusual garments. Of course, Fanny saw in a moment that they were merchants wearing the garments in which they attended church.
Of the four ladies, three were elderly and the fourth much younger. They wore their hair built up in a way that suggested that they desired to follow the fashion but had not the courage to complete the scheme with which they had started. The long and thin and highly-coloured feathers which crowned the stunted structures on their heads gave them the appearance of a picture of unfamiliar birds. Their dresses were extremely glossy and of an expensive material, but there was an eccentric note about all that made them seem not impressive as they should have been, but almost ludicrous. The youngest lady in the row showed unmistakable signs of being given to simpering. She had gone much further than the others of the party in the architecture of her hair, but that was possibly because the material at her command was more abundant. The dressing of her hair, however, was by no means in sympathy with the style of her garments, the latter being simple and indeed rather too girlish for the wearer, who looked between twenty-five and thirty.