To be the fashion, to be one of the chosen few whom all foreigners and outsiders want to see; to be mobbed in the Park, stared at in the playhouse and at the opera; to be imitated in dress, gesture, speech; to introduce the latest mispronunciation and call Bristol "Bristo,"—is it not the highest prize in the lottery of woman's life? To be famous as painter, poet, actor? Alas! a fleeting renown. The new generation is at the door. The veteran must give way. But the empire of fashion is more enduring, and having won that crown, a woman must be a simpleton if she do not wear it all her life, and bring the best people in town to gape and whisper round her death-bed.
Antonia's first ball was a triumph. The lofty suites of rooms, the double staircase and surrounding gallery were thronged with rank and beauty; the clothes were finer than at the last birthday, the silver and gold brocades of dazzling splendour; the jewels, borrowed, hired, or owned, flashed prismatic colours across the softer candlelight. The newspapers expatiated on the entertainment, computed the candles by the thousand, the footmen by the score. Lady Kilrush was at once established as a woman of the highest ton; her drawing-rooms were crowded with morning visitors, her tea-table at six o'clock served as a rendezvous for all that was choicest in the world of fashion. Every day brought a series of engagements—breakfasts at Strawberry Hill, where Horace Walpole exercised his most delightful talents for the amusement of so charming a guest; great dinners where the Ministers and the Opposition drank their three bottles together in amity, the Duke of Newcastle and Mr. Pelham, Pitt and Fox, Granville and Pulteney,—a galaxy of ribbons and stars; parties at Syon House and at Osterley; excursions to Hampton Court and Windsor, braving the wintry roads in a coach and six, and with half a dozen out-riders as a guard against the hazards of the journey. Lady Kilrush had become one of the most popular women in London, and the only evil thing that was said of her was that she did not return visits as quickly as people expected.
Was she happy in the midst of it all, she who believed only in this brief life and the pleasure or the pain that it holds? Yes. She was too young, too beautiful and complete a creature not to be intoxicated by the brilliancy of her new existence, and the sense of unbounded power that wealth gave her. The novelty of the life was in itself enough for happiness. The London in which she moved to-day was as new to her as Rome had been, and more splendid, if less romantic. Operas, concerts, plays, auctions, picture-galleries, masquerades, ridottos, provided a series of pleasures that surpassed her dreams. Handel and the Italian singers offered inexhaustible delight. She might tire of all the rest—of Court balls and modish drums, of bidding for china monsters, buying toys of Mrs. Chenevix and trinkets of jeweller Deard in Pall Mall—but of music she could never tire, and the more she heard of Handel's oratorios the better she loved them.
[CHAPTER XII.]
"SO RUN THAT YE MAY OBTAIN."
Mrs. Stobart, yawning by the neatly swept hearth in her cottage parlour, while her husband sat silent over a book, read an account of Antonia's party in a semi-religious newspaper, prefaced with a pious denunciation of the worldling's extravagant luxury. She insisted on reading the description to her husband, and as she was a slow reader, bored him to extinction.
"How fine it must have been!" she sighed at the end. "Oh, how I should love to have been there! What a pity you put her off with an excuse when she asked us to visit her!"
"My dear Lucy, what an idle thought! Your clothes for such a party would cost a hundred pounds; and how would you like to think that you carried on your person the money that would feed a score of orphan children for the winter?"