With all due allowance for the exaggeration here, certain it is that the truth of the bon-mot gave it its success. Everybody said it was "so good!" And she did not disown it.
"I like people for themselves," she would say; "and, as their virtue does not affect me, so long as I like them and see nothing dishonourable in them, I will open my doors to them."
This un-Britannic audacity of thinking for herself, without reference to the opinion of Mrs. Grundy, and of actually "receiving" women about whom scandal had been busy, very naturally gave scandal a sort of licence with her; but it never rose above whispers. Mrs. Langley Turner herself was a prodigious favourite with all classes of men. The wits liked her, she was so lively; the guardsmen, she was "so larky;" the talkers, she was so chatty; the authors, she was so clever, without ink on her thumb, and knew so much of the world; and everybody, because she was so quiet and good-natured. A genuine woman; frank, hearty, gossipy, flirty, kind, forgiving—in a word, loveable.
It was to her house that the Vyners were driving, Sunday afternoon being a sort of levée with her. When the Vyners arrived the little drawing-room was tolerably full. First on the sofa, by Mrs. Langley Turner, sat a dowager-countess with her young, handsome, and uninteresting daughter. Opposite them, in an easy chair, sat the broken, gouty, but still charming Sir Frederick Winter; a name celebrated in the annals of gallantry, and one of the now almost extinct species of roués, in whom exquisite manner and courtly elegance made vice the very chivalry of vice, so that, in losing all its grossness, it did really seem to lose half its deformity. By his side sat Cecil Chamberlayne, and next to him the pedantic and bony Miss Harridale and her mother; the former seemed to have absorbed the dregs of her ancient family for several generations, so cruelly vulgar was every look and movement. She was talking atrocious French to a bearded dandy, whom Cecil called "some very foreign count;" occasionally entrapping young Lord Boodle into the conversation by an appeal to his judgment, which, after smoothing his blonde moustache with the ivory handle of his riding-cane, he reluctantly drawled out.
Mrs. Meredith Vyner, in her very affectionate and sprightly greeting of Mrs. Langley Turner, had time to perceive that Marmaduke, for whom she came, was not there. It was her first appearance in Eaton-square on a Sunday, for Mrs. Meredith Vyner never missed afternoon service, and nothing but the hope of seeing Marmaduke, whom she was told was a constant visitor, would have induced her to break in thus upon her habits. She comforted herself with the expectation that he might still come.
"Mr. Chamberlayne," said Mrs. Langley Turner, when they were seated, "is giving us an enthusiastic account of a new tragic actress, whom, he says, the Duchesnois, the Dorval, and the Mars—three single ladies rolled into one—would not equal."
"Who is that?" said Mrs. Meredith Vyner, restlessly turning upon Cecil.
"A little Jewess they call Rachel, quite a girl, picked up from the streets, but an empress on the stage. Till I had seen her, I did not believe the human voice capable, in mere speech, of expressing such unutterable sadness, such sobs of woe."
"And you have seen Edmund Kean?"
"Yes, Edmund Kean; but Rachel is something quite incomparable."