The fair tall girl in the swansdown hood was very pretty. That fact the most unfriendly observer could not deny. Whether that dazzling fairness was in some part artificial remained to be proved under a more searching light than the omnibus lamp; but even if that alabaster complexion were due to blanc de something the girl’s eyes were real—lovely dancing blue-grey eyes, softened by dark brown lashes. Her nose was the prettiest thing in that unrecognized order of noses; mouth and chin were in perfect harmony; and she looked round at the strange faces with the sweetest smile, as if she had never suffered from prejudice or undeserved disdain.
The other two girls were of the same type, but not so pretty. The blue girl was freckled and weather-beaten; the Stuart plaid girl was too pale. Titania had taken the lion’s share of the family beauty.
But their dress—that at least afforded widest scope for the scorner. The swansdown hood was of the year one, or perhaps might have been fashionable in the historic winter of the Crimean war; the blue cloud and tawdry blue opera cloak suggested all that is commonest in cheap finery; and what manner of surroundings could a girl have whose people allowed her to go to a hunt ball with her head and shoulders skewered in a tartan shawl with a blanket pin?
“We are taking no chaperon,” said Titania, brightly. “Mrs. Ponto is to chaperon us.”
Mrs. Ponto was the wife of a solicitor at Mandelford, the little town where the ball was being given. It was the first hunt ball there had been at Mandelford within the memory of Sussex, and the fact that this ball was taking place at Mandelford was due to the enterprise of a local cabinet-maker, who had built a public hall or assembly room at the back of his shop, and had thus provided a place for festivity or culture; music, amateur theatricals, Oxford or Cambridge lectures, conjuring or Christy Minstrels.
After that little apologetic remark about the chaperon, there followed a silence, the Champernownes and Miss Green remaining figures of stone, and Maud Hartley feeling that she had done her duty as hostess. The carriage rolled merrily over the frost-bound road, and the hoofs of the four horses sounded like an advance of cavalry in the winter stillness. Perhaps the silence inside the omnibus would have lasted all the way to Mandelford had it not been for little Mr. Tivett, who sat between two Miss Champernownes, half hidden among billows of snowy gauze, peeping out at the three pretty faces on the other side of the ’bus, with bright, inquisitive eyes, like a squirrel out of his nest.
“I don’t know what I have done to offend you, Lady Hartley, that you should not think me worthy to be introduced to these young ladies,” said the good little man at last.
“My dear Mr. Tivett, it was an oversight on my part. I forgot that you and the Miss Marchants had not met before. Of course, you are dying to know them.—Miss Marchant, allow me to introduce Mr. Tivett, a devoted admirer of your sex—a gentleman who knows more about a lady’s dress, and a lady’s accomplishments and amusements, than one woman in a hundred.”
“My dear Lady Hartley,” remonstrated Tivett, in his piping voice, “Miss Marchant will run away with the idea that I am a horrible effeminate little person.”
“She will very soon discover that you are the most obliging little person, and I dare say she will end by being as fond of you as I am.”