Lady Coxe nods, puffs, fans, and smiles, not quite understanding what Mr Whiting meant.
“Toole, who makes her habits, declares she pads them with brown paper,” resumed the guardsman.
“I’m sure I wouldn’t purchase a waist at that price,” rejoined the partner.
“You’ve a very pretty little one of your own, Lady Janet.”
Oh, young ladies, young ladies, why are you in such haste for the freedom and abundance of married life? Why compete for magenta dresses with I won’t say what? Why adopt the language of I won’t say whom? You may attract young men from the society of the first by using the phraseology of the second, but will you retain them with you? They may in time give up Richmond dinners and midnight orgies with Thaïs, for a quiet meal, loving looks, and worthy sentiments with Lucretia. If this will not attract them, so much the worse for them and so much the better for Lucretia. But Lucretia will never win them by the arts of Thaïs. Thaïs, on her own ground, will always beat Lucretia. She knows her weapons better. However far Lucretia may go, she can never come up to Thaïs. Thaïs has a grammar of her own, a syntax, and a prosody—winged words and winged actions. Lucretia may study the accidence, she can never master the rhetoric. Lucretia may unveil her ankle, Thaïs blushes not if her garter be exposed. Think you Lord Tom Noddy will marry Lucretia if she shows him her garter? Thaïs dresses expensively. Thousands will not pay her milliner’s bills. But at the end of six months or a year Lord Tom Noddy leaves her, and she retrenches.
But if Lucretia rivals Thaïs in her dress, Lord Tom Noddy knows that, if he marries her, six months will not see the end of it. Sir Cresswell Cresswell even cannot untie the knots of ribbon and the tangles of lace which figure on that long lithographed linear document, and the lands of Noddy will soon melt in the basilisk smiles of furbelowed Lucretia.
Thaïs is a dashing river, which receives a thousand tributaries, the drainings of the country and the sewers of the town, till it is lost in a morass or absorbed in the ocean. But Lucretia should be a gentle brook, pure from its source, content to murmur innocently and calmly onward, reflecting the light of heaven in its pellucid waters, till it mingles with and strengthens a stronger current than itself. To such as these, tranquil and tranquillising, will man return for happiness and peace, when, jaded with the roar of cities and the struggle of life, he seeks to reconcile his existence with his Creator, to pursue and accomplish his allotted task before the night cometh.
“’Ow de do?” said Lady Coxe, blandly, as Bromley appeared for the first time.
Drawing a chair near the table, he took his seat near Constance.
“You are very late,” she began.