“She looks a perfect lady, mamma; why shouldn’t we?” said Mary Curtis, who was charitable and disposed to be “gushing.”
“It concerns us as much as it concerns anyone, except his father and mother,” Mrs. Curtis said. Both wife and daughter were disposed to be rebellious to the dictum of the head of the house. They had gone through so much for him. Now they were on ground which they felt to be their own, and on which he was no longer supreme, and his opposition quickened their desire to penetrate Arthur’s mystery. No one in the family had seen her, they would be the first, and even that thought was pleasant. “That is Sir John Denham on the other side; if she was very bad would he show himself with them in public,” said Mrs. Curtis.
“What does a fellow like that care?” the General growled back, “the demimonde is what he likes best.”
“Oh, hush, Anthony, think of Mary,” said his wife, “he may like the demimonde, as you say; but I don’t think he’d like to show himself with them in public. And really she looks very nice. What a pretty bonnet! Anthony, you cannot pass by your own nephew.”
“I won’t have anything to say to him; if you do, you must take the consequence,” said the General.
“Oh do, mamma, do!” cried Mary at her other side. And the result was that Mrs. Curtis put her fan over somebody’s shoulder and called “Arthur, Arthur!” and filled the young man’s mind with unutterable dismay.
“Aunt Curtis!” said Arthur, rising to his feet. He grew crimson with the sudden emergency, with the surprise, “Who would have thought of seeing you here?”
“Indeed if you had thought at all on the subject, you might have made sure we should be here,” said Mrs. Curtis, and then she stooped forward and raised her head to whisper: “She is very pretty, Arthur, and of course you think her as nice as she is pretty. Would she like to be introduced to me?”
“She must be now that you are here,” said Arthur, not with any great eagerness. He took her offer a great deal too easily as a matter of course, not as the distinguished kindness she intended it to be. But her curiosity had reached to a very high point, and there was a touch of kindness as well as of self-importance in the idea of being able to mediate in the family affairs. Besides Sir John Denham was chatting familiarly on the other side of the bride, whose looks in her Paris bonnet were unexceptionable; and Sir John Denham was a very useful man to know in Paris, and one before whom many doors opened. And though her husband grumbled and held back, her daughter was still more anxious than she was.
“Oh, Arthur, how pretty she is!” Mary Curtis murmured to her cousin, while her mother made up her mind. It was Mary or some one like her who ought to have been elected to fill the post Nancy had secured, to become the future Lady Curtis. If that post had been filled up by competitive examination, as men’s situations are nowadays, no doubt Mary would have got it; and looking at it entirely as a public position without reference to Arthur (who after all was but a necessary adjunct, and not everything) Mary felt a lively interest, touched with doubt of her qualifications, in the successful candidate. She was anxious to inspect her, to have the satisfaction of feeling, which is a very general sentiment, that she herself could have done it better. Would this girl have the least idea how to behave in so important a post? Mary gave her mother little pushes and pinches to urge her on.