She seemed anxious to know whether I had ever made it up with Colonel Ibbetson, and pleased to hear that I had not, and that I probably never should, and that my feeling against him was strong and bitter and likely to last.
She appeared to hate him very much.
She inquired kindly after myself and my prospects in life, but did not seem deeply interested in my answers—until later, when I talked of my French life, and my dear father and mother, when she listened with eager sympathy, and I was much touched. She asked if I had portraits of them; I had—most excellent miniatures; and when we parted I had promised to call upon her next afternoon, and bring these miniatures with me.
She seemed a languid woman, much ennuyée, and evidently without a large circle of acquaintance. She told me I was the only person in the whole park whom she had bowed to that day. Her husband was in Hamburg, and she was going to meet him in Paris in a day or two.
I had not so many friends but what I felt rather glad than otherwise to have met her, and willingly called, as I had promised, with the portraits.
She lived in a large, new house, magnificently up near the Marble Arch. She was quite alone when I called, and asked me immediately if I had brought the miniatures; and looked at them quite eagerly, and then at me, and exclaimed—
"Good heavens, you are your father's very image!"
Indeed, I had always been considered so.
Both his eyebrows and mine, especially, met in a singular and characteristic fashion at the bridge of the nose, and she seemed much struck by this. He was represented in the uniform of Charles X's gardes du corps, in which he had served for two years, and had acquired the nickname of "le beau Pasquier." Mrs. Deane seemed never to tire of gazing at it, and remarked that my father "must have been the very ideal of a young girl's dream" (an indirect compliment which made me blush after what she had just said of the likeness between us. I almost began to wonder whether she was going to try and make a fool of me again, as she had so successfully done a few years ago).
Then she became interested again in my early life and recollections, and wanted to know whether my parents were fond of each other. They were a most devoted and lover-like pair, and had loved each other at first sight and until death, and I told her so; and so on until I became quite excited, and imagined she must know of some good fortune to which I was entitled, and had been kept out of by the machinations of a wicked uncle.