“My dear being, how do you do?”
The old gentleman bowed till you might have heard his gout creak.
Miss Prue flashed her eyes straight through him, and replied in a tone whose affectation was by no means inferior to his own:
“My lord of Long Acre! My emotion overcomes me.”
Mine overcame me also. For she dared to whip out a dainty handkerchief of cambric with the device “B. G.” woven into a monogram upon one corner. This she flirted and coquetted a quarter of a minute, but contrived to play her saucy eyes behind it in such a style as implied that she was not one half so youthful as she looked. His lordship was delighted, but the dowager grew as wintry as her locks, and endeavoured to arrange our places at the table in such a way that Miss Prue and he should be severely kept apart. My papa, however, was much too early a sort of bird to be out-manœuvred thus. Being a trifle deaf, ’twas not unnatural that he should utterly ignore the dispositions of my aunt. The inference was, of course, that he had not heard them. Therefore Miss Prue and he were somehow seated side by side, and conducted an amiable conversation, not in the mere language of the lips alone, but in the more ardent one of glances. The waistcoat of his lordship grew sigh-deranged, and mighty soon. Every time she fretted up her eyebrows, he paid her a compliment upon ’em; sometimes she repaid him with a repartee, sometimes provoked him to another by a pouting dimple in her mouth. The glass went often to his lips, and the lady was astute enough to encourage his industry without assisting in it.
“Barbara,” my aunt whispered, with a severity that made me shiver, “I am afraid your Miss Canticle is a minx.”
“My dear aunt!” says I.
“Barbara, I said a minx,” the dowager resumed. “The way she hath set her cap at his lordship is disgraceful.”
“Set her cap?” I repeated, in deep perplexity, “my dear aunt, I do not know the phrase, and at least it must be provincial.”
“Coquets, then,” says my aunt, more sternly than before.