Lady Jane rang for her carriage, and made no observations on what had passed. But in the evening she declared that she would not take Lady Frances Arlington out with her any more, that her ladyship’s spirits were too much for her. “Besides, my dear Caroline, when she is with you, I never hear you speak a word—you leave it entirely to her ladyship. After all, she is, if you observe, a perfectly selfish creature.”
Lady Jane recollected various instances of this.
“She merely makes a tool of me—my carriage, my servants, my time, myself, always to be at her service, whenever the aunt-duchess cannot, or will not, do her ladyship’s behests. For the slightest errand she could devise, she would send me to the antipodes; bid me fetch her a toothpick from the farthest inch of the city. Well! I could pardon all the trouble she gives for her fancies, if she would take any trouble for others in return. No—ask her to do the least thing for you, and she tells you, she’d be very glad, but she does not know how; or, she would do it this minute, but that she has not time; or, she would have remembered it certainly, but that she forgot it.”
Caroline admitted that Lady Frances was thoughtless and giddy, but she hoped not incurably selfish, as Lady Jane now seemed to suppose.
“Pardon me, she is incurably selfish. Her childishness made me excuse her for a great while: I fancied she was so giddy that she could not remember any thing; but I find she never forgets any thing on which she has set her own foolish head. Giddy! I can’t bear people who are too giddy to think of any body but themselves.”
Caroline endeavoured to excuse her ladyship, by saying that, by all accounts, she had been educated in a way that must make her selfish. “Idolized, and spoiled, I think you told me she was?”
“True, very likely; let her mother, or her grandmother, settle that account—I am not to blame, and I will not suffer for it. You know, if we entered like your father into the question of education, we might go back to Adam and Eve, and find nobody to blame but them. In the mean time, I will not take Lady Frances Arlington out with me any more—on this point I am determined; for, suppose I forgave her selfishness and childishness, and all that, why should I be subject to her impertinence? She has been suffered to say whatever comes into her head, and to think it wit. Now, as far as I am concerned, I will teach her better.”
Caroline, who always saw the best side of characters, pleaded her freedom from art and dissimulation.
“My dear Caroline, she is not half so free from dissimulation as you are from envy and jealousy. She is always in your way, and you never see it. I can’t bear to hear you defend her, when I know she would and does sacrifice you at any time and at all times to her own amusement. But she shall not stand in your light—for you are a generous, unsuspicious creature. Lady Frances shall never go out with me again—and I have just thought of an excellent way of settling that matter. I’ll change my coach for a vis-à-vis, which will carry only two.”
This Lady Jane, quick and decided, immediately accomplished; she adhered to her resolution, and never did take Lady Frances Arlington out with her more.