“Show him into the drawing-room,” said Belinda. Lady Delacour, though in great pain, rose and retired to her dressing-room. “I shall not be able to go down to these people yet,” said she; “you must make my excuses to the count and to every body; and tell poor Helena I was not angry, though I pushed her away. Keep her below stairs: I will come as soon as I am able. Send Marriott. Do not forget, my dear, to tell Helena I was not angry.”
The reading party went on, and Lady Delacour made her appearance as the company were drinking orgeat, between the fourth and fifth act. “Helena, my dear,” said she, “will you bring me a glass of orgeat?”
Clarence Hervey looked at Belinda with a congratulatory smile: “do not you think,” whispered he, “that we shall succeed? Did you see that look of Lady Delacour’s?”
Nothing tends more to increase the esteem and affection of two people for each other than their having one and the same benevolent object. Clarence Hervey and Belinda seemed to know one another’s thoughts and feelings this evening better than they had ever done before during the whole course of their acquaintance.
After the play was over, most of the company went away; only a select party of beaux esprits stayed to supper; they were standing at the table at which the count had been reading: several volumes of French plays and novels were lying there, and Clarence Hervey, taking up one of them, cried, “Come, let us try our fate by the Sortes Virgilianae.”
Lady Delacour opened the book, which was a volume of Marmontel’s Tales.
“La femme comme il y en a peu!” exclaimed Hervey.
“Who will ever more have faith in the Sortes Virgilianae?” said Lady Delacour, laughing; but whilst she laughed she went closer to a candle, to read the page which she had opened. Belinda and Clarence Hervey followed her. “Really, it is somewhat singular, Belinda, that I should have opened upon this passage,” continued she, in a low voice, pointing it out to Miss Portman.
It was a description of the manner in which la femme comme il y en a peu managed a husband, who was excessively afraid of being thought to be governed by his wife. As her ladyship turned over the page, she saw a leaf of myrtle which Belinda, who had been reading the story the preceding day, had put into the book for a mark.
“Whose mark is this? Yours, Belinda, I am sure, by its elegance,” said Lady Delacour. “So! this is a concerted plan between you two, I see,” continued her ladyship, with an air of pique: “you have contrived prettily de me dire des vérités! One says, ‘Let us try our fate by the Sortes Virgilianae;’ the other has dexterously put a mark in the book, to make it open upon a lesson for the naughty child.”