“How my mouth waters!” cried Betty Williams, looking round at the fruit and confectionaries.
“Would you, ma’am, be pleased,” said Mrs. Bertrand, “to take a glass of ice this warm evening? cream-ice, or water-ice, ma’am? pine-apple or strawberry ice?” As she spoke, Mrs. Bertrand held a salver, covered with ices, toward Miss Warwick: but, apparently, she thought that it was not consistent with the delicacy of friendship to think of eating or drinking when she was thus upon the eve of her first interview with her Araminta. Betty Williams, who was of a different nature from our heroine, saw the salver recede with excessive surprise and regret; she stretched out her hand after it, and seized a glass of raspberry-ice; but no sooner had she tasted it than she made a frightful face, and let the glass fall, exclaiming—
“Pless us! ‘tis not as good as cooseherry fool.”
Mrs. Bertrand next offered her a cheesecake, which Betty ate voraciously.
“She’s actually a female Sancho Panza!” thought Angelina: her own more striking resemblance to the female Quixote never occurred to our heroine—so blind are we to our own failings.
“Who is the young lady?” whispered the mistress of the fruit shop to Betty Williams, whilst Miss Warwick was walking—we should say pacing—up and down the room, in anxious solicitude, and evident agitation.
“Hur’s a young lady,” replied Betty, stopping to take a mouthful of cheesecake between every member of her sentence, “a young lady—that has—lost hur—”
“Her heart—so I thought.”
“Hur purse!” said Betty, with an accent, which showed that she thought this the more serious loss of the two.
“Her purse!—that’s bad indeed:—you pay for your own cheesecake and raspberry-ice, and for the glass that you broke,” said Mrs. Bertrand.