"But it is me, me," I cried. "If I could only tell you!"
A murmur of admiration rippled across the room, in which I distinctly heard a quavering, nasal voice exclaim, "Touching, touching!"
The words—as if a pleasant sheep had bleated—came, I fancied, from a rather less fashionable lady with a lorgnette, who was sitting almost alone on the outskirts of the room, and who I afterwards discovered was only a widowed sister of Lady Pollacke's. But I could spare her but one startled glance, for, at the same moment, I was being presented to the younger daughter of Lord B. Mrs Monnerie sat amply reclining in an immense gilded chair—a lady with a large and surprising countenance. Lady Pollacke's "younger" had misled my fancy. Far from being the slim, fair, sylphlike thing of my expectations, Mrs Monnerie cannot have been many years the junior of my godmother, Miss Fenne.
Her skin had fallen into the queerest folds and puckers. Her black swimming eye under a thick eyebrow gazed down her fine, drooping nose at me with a dwelling expression at once indulgent, engrossed, and amused. With a gracious sweep of her hand she drew aside her voluminous silk skirts so that I could at once install myself by her side in a small, cane-seated chair that had once, I should fancy, accommodated a baby Pollacke, and had been brought down from the nursery for this occasion.
Thus, then, I found myself—the exquisitely self-conscious centre of attention—striving to nibble a biscuit, nurse my child-size handleless tea-cup, and respond to her advances at one and the same time.
Lady Pollacke hung like a cloud at sunset over us both, her cheek flushed with the effort to be amused at every sentence which Mrs Monnerie uttered and to share it as far as possible with the rest of her guests.
"A little pale, eh?" mused Mrs Monnerie, brooding at me with her great eye. "She wants sea-air; sea-air—just to tinge that rose-leaf porcelain. I must arrange it."
I assured her that I was in the best of health.
"Not at all," she replied. "All young people boast of their health. When I was your age every thought of illness was as black as a visitation of the devil. That's the door where we must lay all such evils, isn't it, Mr Pellew?"
A lean, tall, birdlike figure, the hair on his head still showing traces of auburn, disengaged itself from a knot of charmed spectators.