This spirit, embodied in a good deal of flesh and blood and known as Lady Beranger, is here, presiding at afternoon tea.
Folds of rich black satin fall around her ample form, yards of priceless Chantilly go round her skirts and throat and wrists.
Satins and laces are her familiars, though the Beranger exchequer is low, for Worth and Elise, Lewis and Allenby, Marshall and Snelgrove supply them, and never worry for their bills.
Leaders of Society like Lady Beranger are walking advertisements of the goods, and it is so easy to make your plain Mrs. Brown, Jones or Robinson pay up any bad debts among the “quality.”
Lady Beranger becomes her costly garments as well as they become her. She is a very tall woman, and very stately and handsome. Perhaps in the very palmiest days her beauty had never been classical. How seldom beauty is so! but she is very imposing to look on, and she is exceptionally thoroughbred in appearance. A woman in fact who bears upon her the unmistakable cachet of blue blood.
She has of course faults, and the gravest of them is love of money. It is the dream of her life that her lovely bouquet of daughters shall marry “fortunes,” and her cross at present consists in the bitter knowledge that both Trixy and Zai are in love, and in love with a pauper.
A pauper, for Trixy is, in her way—a very different way to her sisters’—as much in love with Carl Conway as Zai is.
Afternoon tea is quite an institution at Sandilands, and at half-past four Lady Beranger settles down to a substantial meal of cake and muffins and bread and butter, while the olive branches look on in silent wonderment, and ask themselves if a love of the fleshpots comes hand in hand with riper years.
“Trixy, I forgot to tell you that I met old Stubbs near the Lodge gates, and he is coming to call this afternoon,” Gabrielle announces, between slow sips of her tea.
“Is he! well he won’t find me at home,” a thin and peevish voice answers.