Foremost, most energetic, most unrebuffable of these emissaries is Miss Priscilla Denzil. She flies about hither and thither, with her white gown all limp and tumbled, and her rough hair pushing its way resolutely from under the blue ribbons which make a vain show of confining it à la Grecque. She is not thinking a bit of how she is looking; her whole soul is intent on doing a good stroke of business, and none can escape her.
Sir Thomas Gerard has just entered the hall. Having ridden into Melford on magisterial business, the idea has struck him of how much better and more cuttingly he will be able to abuse the bazaar at dinner this evening if he has had the advantage of seeing it. With a dog-whip in his hand, and an intense desire to lay it about the shoulders of the company expressed in his cross face, he is pushing his way along when attacked by the dauntless Priscilla.
"Oh! Sir Thomas, please let me put you down in the raffle for a fender-stool; so handsome! white arums on a red ground; do let me, so handsome!"
"A what, Miss Priscilla?"
"A fender-stool."
"Humph! the stupidest things that ever were invented," answers the baronet, snarling. "If they had been made expressly to trip people up, and pitch them head-foremost into the fire, they could not have answered the purpose better."
"Did they ever pitch you head-foremost into the fire?" asks Miss Prissy, insinuatingly ("because [aside], if so, I wonder whoever was fool enough to pick you out again!")
"No, and they shall never have the chance as long as I can prevent them," replies the gracious elder, walking off.
For a minute Priscilla stands still, rebuffed; but recovering herself, speedily rushes off again, charges with her fender-stool an old maid who has one already, and a poor little whity-brown curate who has no house to put one in, &c., &c.
"I am afraid I have not done them up very neatly," Esther is saying, as she gives a parcel into Mr. De Grey's hands—Miss Smith having at length frightened that gentleman from her side by the rapid strides to intimacy which she was making with him—"My fingers toil in vain after the nimbleness with which shopmen whisk a parcel into shape and compactness before you have time to look round."