"Who is that, I wonder?" whispered Lady Maréchale, acidulating herself in readiness, after the custom of English ladies when catching sight of a stranger whom they "don't know."
"I wonder! All alone—how very queer!" echoed Mrs. Protocol, drawing her black lace shawl around her, with that peculiar movement which announces a woman's prescience of something antagonistic to her, that is to be repelled d'avance, as surely as a hedgehog's transfer of itself into a prickly ball denotes a sense of a coming enemy, and a need of caution and self-protection.
"Who is that deucedly handsome woman?" whispered Maréchale to me.
"What a charming creature!" echoed Dunbar.
The person referred to was the only woman at the table d'hôte besides my sisters—a sister-tourist, probably; a handsome—nay more, a beautiful woman, about eight-and-twenty, distinguished-looking, brilliant, with a figure voluptuously perfect as was ever the Princess Borghese's. To say a woman looks a lady, means nothing in our day. "That young lady will wait on you, sir," says the shopman, referring to the shopwoman who will show you your gloves. "Hand the 'errings to that lady, Joe," you hear a fishmonger cry, as you pass his shop-door, referring by his epithet to some Mrs. Gamp or Betsy Priggs in search of that piscatory cheer at his stall. Heaven forbid we should give the abused and degenerate title to any woman deserving of the name! Generalize a thing, and it is vulgar. "A gentleman of my acquaintance," says Spriggs, an auctioneer and house-agent, to Smith, a collector of the water-rate. "A man I know," says Pursang, one of the Cabinet, to Greville Tempest, who is heir to a Dukedom, and has intermarried with a royal house. The reason is plain enough. Spriggs thinks it necessary to inform Smith, who otherwise might remain ignorant of so signal a fact, that he actually does know a gentleman, or rather what he terms such. Pursang knows that Tempest would never suspect him of being lié with men who were anything else; the one is proud of the fine English, the other is content with the simple phrase! Heaven forbid, I say, we should, nowadays, call any woman a lady who is veritably such; let us fall back on the dignified, definitive, courtly last-century-name of gentlewoman. I should be glad to see that name revived; it draws a line that snobbissimi cannot pass, and has a grand simplicity about it that will not attract Spriggs, Smith, and Spark, and Mesdames S., leurs femmes!
Our sister-tourist, then, at the Toison d'Or, looked, to my eyes at the least, much more than a "lady," she looked an aristocrate jusqu'au bout des ongles, a beautiful, brilliant, dazzling brunette, with lovely hazel eyes, flashing like a tartaret falcon's under their arched pencilled eyebrows, quite an unhoped godsend in Vicq d'Azyr, where only stragglers resort as yet, though—alas for my Arcadia—my sister's pet physician, who sent them thither, is about, I believe, to publish a work, entitled "The Water-Spring in the Wilderness; or, A Scamper through Spots Unknown," which will do a little advertising of himself opportunely, and send hundreds next season to invade the wild woodlands and sunny valleys he inhumanly drags forth into the gas-glare of the world.
The brilliant hazel eyes were opposite to me at dinner, and were, I confess, more attractive to me than the stewed pigeons, the crisp frog-legs, and the other viands prepared by the (considering we were in the heart of one of the most remote provinces) really not bad cook of the Toison d'Or. Lady Maréchale and Mrs. Protocol honored her with that stare by which one woman knows so well how to destroy the reputation of another without speech; they had taken her measurement by some method of feminine geometry unknown to us, and the result was apparently not favorable to her, for over the countenances of the two ladies gathered that expression of stiff dignity and virtuous disdain, in the assuming of which, as I have observed before, they are inimitable proficients. "Evidently not a proper person!" was written on every one of their lineaments. Constance and Agneta had made up their minds with celerity and decision as to her social status, with, it is to be presumed, that unerring instinct which leads their sex to a conclusion so instantaneously, that, according to a philosopher, a woman will be at the top of the staircase of Reasoning by a single spring, while a man is toiling slowly up the first few steps.
"You are intending to remain here some days, madame?" asked the fair stranger, with a charming smile, of Lady Maréchale—a pleasant little overture to chance ephemeral acquaintance, such as a table d'hôte surely well warrants.
But the pleasant little overture was one to which Lady Maréchale was far too English to respond. With that inimitable breeding for which our countrymen and women are continentally renowned, she bent her head with stately stiffness, indulged herself with a haughty stare at the offender, and turned to Agneta, to murmur in English her disgust with the cuisine of the really unoffending Toison d'Or.
"Poor Spes would eat nothing. Fenton must make him some panada. But perhaps there was nothing better than goat's milk in the house! What could Dr. Berkeley be thinking of? He described the place quite as though it were a second Meurice's or Badischer Hof!"