In Lady Lucie’s set Lady Bell had not been without hearing of the young loves, consecrated by tragedy, of such a couple as Lord and Lady Tavistock. She had witnessed with her own eyes “proper” young pairs rejoicing in their real union, entering on life with every assurance of the closest friendship, the tenderest intimacy till death should them part.
With her rapidly budding womanly instincts, with the fervour of her youthful recollections, Lady Bell absolutely revolted at being wedded to Mr. Trevor without her will being consulted.
The deliverer whom she had dimly anticipated in a glamour and glory of romance was not a bull-necked, stout-bodied, short-legged squire of sixty and upwards, in a brown coat and scarlet vest.
Lady Bell had owed to Squire Trevor the trifling boon of his having walked in the same direction as herself at Brooklands. Oh! how she wished she had not been so perverse as to weary of the strutting and speechifying of Lord Thorold and Miss Babbage, if sitting still would have prevented this catastrophe!
But although Squire Trevor had saved Lady Bell by a word from an unscrupulous vagabond, Lady Bell had not taken to Squire Trevor from the first. She had been disagreeably struck by his touchy vanity, his rude dictation. She was indignant, disgusted, furiously angry when she learnt the proposal which he had made of himself within the first week of their acquaintance.
But who was to help Lady Bell to assort her sentiments?
Instead of helping, every one was against her, and she was only a girl of fifteen, all the more likely to be overborne and to give in at last, because of two things, the unreasonable violence of her opposition, and her old-fashioned, factitious dignity and self-consciousness.
Lady Bell’s first tactics were sufficiently transparent; she made herself as disagreeable as possible to Squire Trevor. She never spoke to him voluntarily, and she only answered him in monosyllables.
She retreated before his approach in the wilderness garden, or under the portico, showing him the last sweep of the tail of her train. She turned her shoulder to him, polite as she was, when she was forced to encounter him in Mrs. Die’s parlour, and when, to Lady Bell’s anger and dismay, the seat next her was significantly appropriated to Squire Trevor.
She would not accept the early rose which he took from the bow-pot and offered to her.