"Fresh! Young!" cried Judith. "Don't mock me, girl! I feel like the Witch of Endor. But for sport I'll dress as a bride."
And so, dazzling in white satin and white velvet, with a string of priceless pearls twisted amidst her powdered hair, and a plume of snowy ostrich feathers drooping upon her ivory shoulders, Lady Judith Topsparkle appeared at Lady Townley's drum, which was an assemblage of all the best people in town. Chesterfield was there, big with his mission to the Hague, and his successes among burgomasters' fat wives. Hervey and his beautiful young wife were among the gayest spirits; and Pulteney, punning in Greek, flushed with his fourth bottle; and Bolingbroke, whose easy equability no potations could ever disturb.
The bucks and beaux all gathered round that radiant creature, whose insolence charmed them more than the amiability of other women, and who could keep them all at a distance, yet draw them as the magnet draws iron; could have them fluttering about her and following her from room to room, yet never say too kind a word or return too ardent a glance. To one only had she been kind; for one only had those brilliant eyes melted to softness.
To-night she was at her gayest. Every one noticed her vivacity; the women with malevolent shrewdness.
"Lady Judith must have been losing at cards," said one. "There is an affectation in that arrogant mirth of hers which hides some secret agony."
"She may have been backing race-horses at Newmarket," replied another. "I have heard her betting with Chesterfield."
"Or she may have quarrelled with Lavendale," hazarded a cantankerous mother of three plain daughters.
"What, is that affair begun again?"
"It began the day he came back to England, I believe. They took up the story at the very page where they left off. The only difference was Mr. Topsparkle, and he seems the essence of good-nature."
Durnford looked in late at the party, after a stormy sitting in the House, where Walpole was fighting for his Excise Bill, and he was astounded at beholding Lady Judith the centre of an adoring circle. He had left a Niobe, he found a Juno, flaming in all the glory of her peacock car. Mr. Topsparkle came on from Soho Square when he heard his wife had changed her mind and had gone to Lady Townley's. She could not be too frivolous or too expensive for his humour, though he drew the line at gambling debts. It was when she was grave that he suspected her. And he had suspected her the other night at Vauxhall. That disappearance in the dark walks with Lavendale had roused his ire, for at heart he had always been jealous of that old lover; and then under a feigned somnolence he had watched those two whispering together at the supper-table in the King's Head arbour, and he had made up his mind that there was mischief. He had hinted his suspicions to his wife that night after their return to Soho, and injured innocence had taken the most vehement form in that offended lady. Recriminations of the bitterest kind had followed: he had reproached her with her extravagance, her passion for dice, cards, lotteries, and race-horses; he had taunted her with the poverty of her girlhood, her concealed eagerness to trap a rich husband.