This lady seemed to take extreme pleasure in accosting Thaddeus by the appellation of "Friend," "My good man," "Mr. What's-your-name," and similar squibs of insult, with which the prosperous assail the unfortunate. Such random shots they know often inflict the most galling wounds.
However, "Friend," "My good man," and "Mr. What's-your-name," disappointed this lady's small artillery of effect. He seemed invulnerable both to her insolence and to her affectation; for to be thought a wit, by even Miss Dundas's emigrant tutor, was not to be despised; though at the very moment in which she desired his admiration, she supposed her haughtiness had impressed him with a proper sense of his own meanness and a high conception of her dignity.
She jumped about the room, assumed infantine airs, played with Euphemia's lap-dag, fondled it, seated herself on the floor and swept the carpet with her fine flaxen tresses; but she performed the routine of captivation in vain. Thaddeus recollected having seen this pretty full-grown baby, in her peculiar character of a profligate wife, pawning her own and her husband's property; he remembered this, and the united shafts of her charms and folly fell unnoticed to the ground.
When Thaddeus took his leave, Miss Beaufort, as was her custom, retired for an hour to read in her dressing-room, before she directed her attention to the toilet. She opened a book, and ran over a few pages of Madame de Stael's Treatise on the Passions; but such reasoning was too abstract for her present frame of mind, and she laid the volume down.
She dipped her pen in the inkstand. Being a letter in debt to her guardian, she thought she would defray it now. She accomplished "My dear uncle," and stopped. Whilst she rested on her elbow, and, heedless of what she was doing, picked the feather of her quill to pieces, no other idea offered itself than the figure of Thaddeus sitting 'severe in youthful beauty!' and surrounded by the contumelies with which the unworthy hope to disparage the merit they can neither emulate nor overlook.
Uneasy with herself, she pushed the table away, and, leaning her cheek on her arm, gazed into the rainbow varieties of a beaupot of flowers which occupied the fireplace. Even their gay colors appeared to fade before her sight, and present to her vacant eye the form of Thaddeus, with the melancholy air which shaded his movements. She turned round, but could not disengage herself from the spirit that was within her; his half-suppressed sighs seemed yet to thrill in her ear and weigh upon her heart.
"Incomparable young man!" cried she, starting up, "why art thou so wretched? Oh! Lady Tinemouth, why have you told me of his many virtues? Why have I convinced myself that what you said is true? Oh! why was I formed to love an excellence which I never can approach?"
The natural reply to these self-demanded questions suggesting itself, she assented with a tear to the whisperings of her heart—that when cool, calculating reason would banish the affections, it is incapable of filling their place.
She rang the bell for her maid.
"Marshall, who dines with Lady Dundas to-day?"