“Like! My dear Jack, you’ll fall over head and ears in love with her the moment you see her. A little cold, perhaps, but that will just suit you.”
“Good family?” asks John, signing and folding the letter he has finished.
“So good that I was afraid at first it would be useless thinking of her. But she’s a sensible girl, no confounded nonsense about her, and the family are poor as church mice. In fact—well, to tell the truth, we have become most excellent friends, and she told me herself frankly that she meant to marry a rich man, and didn’t much care whom.”
“That sounds hopeful,” remarks the would-be bridegroom, with his peculiar dry smile: “when shall I have the pleasure of seeing her?”
“I want you to come with me to-night to the Garden,” replies the other; “she will be in Lady Heatherington’s box, and I will introduce you.”
So that evening John Ingerfield goes to Covent Garden Theatre, with the blood running a trifle quicker in his veins, but not much, than would be the case were he going to the docks to purchase tallow—examines, covertly, the proposed article from the opposite side of the house, and approves her—is introduced to her, and, on closer inspection, approves her still more—receives an invitation to visit—visits frequently, and each time is more satisfied of the rarity, serviceableness, and quality of the article.
If all John Ingerfield requires for a wife is a beautiful social machine, surely here he has found his ideal. Anne Singleton, only daughter of that persistently unfortunate but most charming of baronets, Sir Harry Singleton (more charming, it is rumoured, outside his family circle than within it), is a stately, graceful, high-bred woman. Her portrait, by Reynolds, still to be seen above the carved wainscoting of one of the old City halls, shows a wonderfully handsome and clever face, but at the same time a wonderfully cold and heartless one. It is the face of a woman half weary of, half sneering at the world. One reads in old family letters, whereof the ink is now very faded and the paper very yellow, long criticisms of this portrait. The writers complain that if the picture is at all like her she must have greatly changed since her girlhood, for they remember her then as having a laughing and winsome expression.
They say—they who knew her in after-life—that this earlier face came back to her in the end, so that the many who remembered opening their eyes and seeing her bending down over them could never recognise the portrait of the beautiful sneering lady, even when they were told whom it represented.
But at the time of John Ingerfield’s strange wooing she was the Anne Singleton of Sir Joshua’s portrait, and John Ingerfield liked her the better that she was.
He had no feeling of sentiment in the matter himself, and it simplified the case that she had none either. He offered her a plain bargain, and she accepted it. For all he knew or cared, her attitude towards this subject of marriage was the usual one assumed by women. Very young girls had their heads full of romantic ideas. It was better for her and for him that she had got rid of them.