“But the best of it is,” continued the young lady, “that she is seldom in a passion without making a hundred mistakes, for which she is usually obliged afterwards to ask a thousand pardons.”
“By that account,” said Lady Anne, “which I believe to be just, her contrition is always ten times as great as her offence.”
“Now you talk of contrition, Lady Anne,” said Mr. Hervey, “I should think of my own offences: I am very sorry that my indiscreet questions gave Miss Delacour any pain—my head was so full of the mammoth, that I blundered on without seeing what I was about till it was too late.”
“Pray, sir,” said Mrs. Margaret Delacour, who now returned, and took her seat upon a sofa, with the solemnity of a person who was going to sit in judgment upon a criminal, “pray, sir, may I ask how long you have been acquainted with my Lady Delacour?”
Clarence Hervey took up a book, and with great gravity kissed it, as if he had been upon his oath in a court of justice, and answered,
“To the best of my recollection, madam, it is now four years since I had first the pleasure and honour of seeing Lady Delacour.”
“And in that time, intimately as you have had the pleasure of being acquainted with her ladyship, you have never discovered that she had a daughter?”
“Never,” said Mr. Hervey.
“There, Lady Anne!—There!” cried Mrs. Delacour, “will you tell me after this, that Lady Delacour is not a monster?”
“Every body says that she’s a prodigy,” said Lady Anne; “and prodigies and monsters are sometimes thought synonymous terms.”