If there was one thing on which Lady Dudgeon prided herself in secret more than another, it was upon her epistolary talents. She was, indeed, a most voluminous and untiring correspondent. However trivial might be the subject about which she was writing, she had a copious stream of words at command--a stream that never ran itself dry. The involution of her sentences was only equalled by the ambiguity of their meaning. Because her correspondents acknowledged that they had to read her letters two or three times over before they could thoroughly comprehend all that was intended to be conveyed by them, she--and in some cases they also--came to look upon it as a sign of profundity, of deep thought, clothed with the fine flowers of rhetoric, that such a difficulty should be so generally admitted to exist. To have written out a plain statement of facts in a few plain words, was a feat of which her ladyship was quite incapable, and one which, to do her justice, she would have despised herself for even attempting. She had been so often complimented on her letter-writing (and knowing for a fact, as she did, that several of her correspondents carefully preserved her epistles) that there had grown up in her mind a sort of vague idea that, after her demise, some one would certainly be found who would look upon it as an act of pious duty to awaken the world to a sense of its loss, to let it see for itself what a genius had dwelt for years in its midst, save by a few choice spirits, unappreciated and unknown. There was only one way by which a heedless world could be thus enlightened, and that was by publishing--posthumously, of course--a selection of her ladyship's correspondence. The fame denied to her during her lifetime would be hers after death. After this fashion it was that Lady Dudgeon fed her imagination: and yet there were not wanting people who denied her the possession of any such commodity, and who mentally catalogued her as one of the most prosaic and commonplace of her sex.
"I hope you have not forgotten our conversation in my cousin's office at Pembridge?" said Olive suddenly to Jack, as she shut down the lid of the box and put her own two particular volumes under her arm, preparatory to leaving the room.
"There are some conversations that I can never forget: that is one of them."
"I have sometimes thought since how very foolish it was of me to talk to you in the way I did on that occasion. But you had only yourself to blame."
"I am not aware that there was any foolishness in the matter: quite the contrary. But tell me in what way I was to blame."
"In causing my aunt to feel such an interest in you. Me, too, you interested. We were both anxious to assist you, if it were possible to do so."
"And you have assisted me, and I thank both you and Mrs. Kelvin very heartily for it."
"Is not Miss Lloyd charming?"
"Thoroughly charming."
"You seem to have succeeded in interesting her, as you interested my aunt and me," said Olive, with one of her wintry smiles.