The moment the reader’s voice ceased, Lady Angelica approached the table. “Ten millions of pardons!” said she, drawing some cards from beneath Miss Caroline Percy’s elbow, which rested on them. “Unpardonable wretch that I am, to have disturbed such a reverie—and such an attitude! Mr. Barclay,” continued her ladyship, “now if you have leisure to think of me, may I trouble you for some of your little cards for the attic of my dear Folly?”
Mr. Barclay coolly presented the cards to her ladyship: then looked out of the window, observed that his horse was at the door, and was following Mr. Percy out of the room, when Lady Angelica, just as Mr. Barclay passed, blew down her tower, and exclaimed, “There’s an end of my folly—of one of my follies, I mean: I wish I could blow them all away so easily.”
The sigh and look of penitence with which she pronounced these words were accepted as expiation—Mr. Barclay stopped and returned; while sweeping the wreck of her tower from the table, she repeated,
“Easy, as when ashore an infant stands,
And draws imagined houses on the sands,
The sportive wanton, pleased with some new play,
Sweeps the slight works and fancied domes away:
Thus vanish at thy touch the tow’rs and walls,
The toil of mornings in a moment falls.”
“Beautiful lines!” said Mr. Barclay.
“And charmingly repeated,” said Sir James Harcourt: “are they your ladyship’s own?”
“No; Homer’s,” said she, smiling; “Pope’s Homer’s, I mean.”
To cover his blunder as fast as possible, Sir James went on to something else, and asked what her ladyship thought of Flaxman’s sketches from the Iliad and Odyssey? He had seen the book lying on the library table yesterday: indeed, his eye had been caught, as it lay open, by a striking resemblance—he knew it was very rude to talk of likenesses—but, really, the resemblance was striking between a lady he had in his view, and one of the figures in Flaxman, of Venus, or Penelope, he could not say which, but he would look for the book and see in a moment.
The book was not to be found on the library table; Mrs. Hungerford said she believed it was in the Oriel: Sir James went to look—Miss Caroline Percy was drawing from it—that was unlucky, for Mr. Barclay followed, stayed to admire Miss Percy’s drawings, which he had never seen before, and in looking over these sketches of hers from Flaxman’s Homer, and from Euripides and Æschylus, which the Lady Pembrokes showed him, and in speaking of these, he discovered so much of Caroline’s taste, literature, and feeling, that he could not quit the Oriel. Lady Angelica had followed to prevent mischief, and Mrs. Hungerford had followed to enjoy the pleasure of seeing Caroline’s modest merit appreciated. Whilst Mr. Barclay admired in silence, Sir James Harcourt, not with his usual politeness, exclaimed, “I protest I had no notion that Miss Caroline Percy drew in this style!”
“That’s possible,” cried Lady Mary Pembroke, colouring with that prompt indignation which she was prone to feel when any thing was said that seemed derogatory to her friends, “that’s possible, Sir James; and yet you find Miss Caroline Percy does draw in this very superior style—yes, and it is the perfection of her accomplishments, that they are never exhibited.”