Amy smiled so coquettishly, and looked so much all that she had described, that his lordship soon found himself in an exuberance of spirits.
“Ah, I am no match for you; it is easy to see that you have lived in the world, Miss Somerton. Your Belgravian guns are too many for our poor little pop-guns in the country, eh, Miss Tallant?” said his lordship.
“Miss Somerton has lived in the country all her life,” said Phœbe.
“You surprise me,” said the Earl.
“And should never desire, I think, to live anywhere else,” said Amy. “On the whole I think a country life by far the happiest, and the most independent.”
“Indeed, I think so too,” said his lordship. “There is a certain amount of solitude in a comparatively retired country life, which allows the greatest scope for freedom of thought, and for manners and opinions.”
“In what is called society, you sacrifice your liberty, you lose your own individuality,” said Amy, taking up the theme in a manner that she knew would be highly pleasing to Lord Verner, for she had an ample knowledge of his whims and peculiarities, and she was bent upon playing her new part in the most effective manner possible.
“Hear, hear!—admirably well illustrated!” said Earl Verner. “In the country one is not bored with all the trumpery little gossip of town. The news gets fairly sifted before it reaches us, as Gibbon, I think, somewhere says. We are the lookers-on, and we can rest or give up when we cease to be interested. In society, as you say, we are mixed up in the throng, we are part of all that is going on, we must be interested in all the frivolous nonsense. O, no, nothing like the country, and especially when you can occupy the mind.”
From this topic, in which Phœbe took great interest, the Earl glided into more lively subjects, and talked of pictures and new books; and he was surprised at the smartness and learning evinced in some of Miss Somerton’s replies. She seemed to know a little of everything, and to express herself with such charming deference to his lordship’s greater wisdom, that Earl Verner was quite delighted. He was not bored a bit; he had never before been in the society of women, who knew anything about books, without being bored; he hated women who were at all clever as a rule; but there was an unaffected modesty, a charming naïveté about this lady’s manner, which left its fascinating spirit upon Lord Verner long after he had left Barton Hall. Who could she be, this splendid specimen of common sense and beauty?
When he had fairly left the house, Miss Somerton made a curtsey to herself in a mirror, and said, “Très bonne, Mademoiselle, your acting is really most natural.”