"We may imagine the clock put on thirty years, and ourselves already in possession," he says, laughing—"only minus the gout and wrinkles and spectacles we shall also have come into possession of by then."
"What the devil do people mean," says Sir Thomas, entering the morning-room that evening after dinner, with his hair brushed up into a stiff cockatoo, and tugging away at a huge pair of white kid gloves, off which he has already succeeded in bursting both buttons, "dragging a man away from his own fireside to see a lot of fools cutting capers, and flourishing their heels in each other's faces?"
From Sir Thomas's description one would imagine that the Cancan was habitually danced at the balls he frequents.
The door opens, and Miss Blessington makes her appearance; looking, not vain or conscious, but calmly defiant of any one to make a better—a triumph of lace and tulle and flowers, and milk-white flesh, and grand, cold curves and contours.
"Oh, how beautiful!" cries Essie, clasping her little hands, with the unaffected admiration of one handsome woman for another. "I know it is rude to make personal remarks; but is not she, Lady Gerard?"
"It is a pretty dress," replies miladi, whose unwieldy bulk not even the cunningest of Parisian couturières has been able to fashion into anything nearer than an approximation to any shape at all; "but I never think that Elise's taste is as good as Jane Clarke's used to be."
Constance has walked to a pier-glass, and is examining with anxiety a bite that a gnat has been savage enough to inflict on her face, a little under the lower lip, and which has been disturbing her wonted composed serenity ever since 3 p.m., when the catastrophe took place.
"Does it show much?" she asks, turning with a concerned, serious look to Esther.
"Oh no! hardly at all."