Certainly, Lady Teazle fully deserved the rapturous praises of Montmorency. Her lovely dark eyes shone all the brighter from the contrast to the powdered wig; while her splendid figure was displayed to the utmost advantage by means of her handsome brocaded dress.
‘And so you recognised me under these tinsel robes, Julia?’
‘Your voice is unmistakable; I should have known it anywhere, Emily.—When do you intend to return to your own sphere?’
‘First tell me, Julia, how you managed to penetrate these sacred precincts?’
‘Oh! my husband, who knows everybody, said he could at once accomplish it, directly I told him you were my old schoolfellow at Barbadoes.—Now, answer me my question, there’s a dear!’
‘I have found my proper sphere; I am free, popular, and admired. Instead of one admirer, I have hundreds, and the number is increasing nightly. What can woman wish for more?’
‘I’ll tell you, Emily: a nice husband, and domestic bliss.’
The actress indulged in a scarcely audible sigh. ‘That might have been my lot. I mean the domestic bliss part of the affair, if I had not had it dinned into my ears from morning till night that there was only one road to happiness—a union with Mr Stanley, whom I have never seen.’
‘You might have liked him very much.’
‘Impossible, my dear Julia. The very fact of a man being ticketed like a prize animal at a show, and then his being introduced to you as your certain and future husband, would be quite sufficient to make me detest him.—No, Julia; when I marry, I will myself make the selection, and he must be one who is ignorant that his intended is a rich heiress.’