"How early you left!" said Lady Polwhele, a stout matron of fifty, revealing a bedaubed complexion and a galaxy of patches; "I saw you sneak away. Do you know that I won twenty pound? I feel in the seventh heaven. It is odiously little to win, but it may be the turning-point of my bad luck. I have been losing persistently at every venture I have made ever since my wretched South Sea bonds, when I ought to have sold out and didn't. I could have sold them at nine hundred, Asterley, and can you believe that I was fool enough to keep them till they dropped to a hundred and twenty? The idiots about me declared there must inevitably be as rapid a rise as there had been a fall. Would you believe it, Ted?"
"I have heard the story so often that it has become an article of faith with me," answered Mr. Asterley, with a bored look. He, too, had taken off his mask, and revealed a small-featured, effeminate face and a faded complexion. He had not taken to paint yet, and he looked as if he had not slept for a week. His city-bred wife was one of Lady Polwhele's companions, for that worthy dowager had patched up a peace with her old admirer, and finding she could not dispense with the assiduities of the husband, now submitted to the society of the wife as a necessary evil. She was said to be forming Mrs. Asterley. But if the pupil was docile, the material was of the coarsest, or so her ladyship declared in confidence to at least fifty particular friends. "I think if any one could make a fine lady out of a handsome dairymaid I ought to be able to do it," she told her intimates, when she was bemoaning Mrs. Asterley's incorrigible vulgarity.
"You have trained so many fine gentlemen that it must be agreeable to work on the other sex by way of variety," said her confidante.
"O, I have always liked to have boys of good family about me to fetch and carry," answered Lady Polwhele carelessly. "They are better than black footmen; they want no wages, and they have not that horrid African odour which makes so many fine houses smell like a zoological garden. But for Ted Asterley's sake I should really like to make his wife presentable. Her high-mettled prancing at the last birthnight ball nearly set the room in a roar. Captain Bloodyer told me that her steps in the country dance reminded him of nothing but a dealer's horse being taught to step high over bundles of straw in a livery-yard. If the creature would only be quiet there might be some hope for her, but her plebeian blood has furnished her with a stock of animal spirits which must be her ruin."
Mrs. Asterley's spirits had not abandoned her even at three o'clock in the morning. This was her first visit to the famous house in Soho, and she ran about the room exclaiming at everything.
"Dear, what a funny room," she cried, "with all those crooked knives and pretty old dish-covers on the wall! I thought they kept the like of them in the butler's pantry, but they're mighty pretty against that carpet-work."
Then coming to a sudden stop before Lady Judith, and giggling shyly, she exclaimed, "Lord, how I should love a room just like this, your la'ship! It has such a sweet pretty murderous kind of an air, just like Bluebeard's chamber, where he kept his wives' heads. I shall ask papa to let me furnish a room the same pattern, so I shall."
"Pray do, Mrs. Asterley. The frame will charmingly suit the picture. You have a vapourish artistic air which would be admirably set off by antique furniture."
"My dear Belle, Mr. Topsparkle's old Venetian tapestry is both priceless and unique," said her husband reprovingly.
"What, that old carpet-work on the walls? I thought they had that for cheapness."