John Gore saw in season the flash of my lord’s oars, the bluff bow of the galley pushing the ripples aside, the banner floating over the stern. Going to the water-steps, he stood there and waited, hat in hand, the quiet dignity of such a man seeming in keeping with such a scene. With one foot on the gunwale, he gave a hand in turn to my lord’s guests, while the rowers held the boat in place by using their oars as poles.
The character of the different women might have been guessed by the way each accepted the curtesy of the man upon the steps. Anne Purcell smiled in his face with a full-blown and fragrant vanity. Mrs. Catharine Gore gave him a severe stare. My Lady Marden might have melted his dignity with her good-humor; her daughter faltered with assumed shyness, looking at her feet and not into John Gore’s eyes. As for Barbara, she ignored his hand unconcernedly, gazing straight before her with a straight mouth and a passionless face.
The gentlemen followed, John Gore leaving them to their own legs. He had turned and climbed the steps close on Barbara’s heels, noticing, as a man does, the poise of her head and the proud youth in her figure. A high-born and imperious spirit seemed proper from one who walked between those stiff and stately trees. John Gore would not have wished for a hoyden in such a setting.
The party moved up the central walk toward the house, my Lady Marden verbosely pleased with everything that she saw. “But there were no peacocks! Surely that sweet terrace should have been a proper place for the birds to show their tails! But perhaps my Lord Gore did not like their voices?” My lord replied that he saw so many peacocks at Whitehall that there was nothing singular or distinctive about having such commonplace birds on show. He would send for a barge-load if my Lady Marden would promise to imitate a pea-hen in her dress. Anne Purcell looked tried by the fat woman’s excessive and loquacious amiability. She had Mrs. Catharine Gore for a stimulating “cup of bitters,” Mrs. Kate, whose wood billet of a figure looked fit only for a great wheel farthingale. My lord’s two gentlemen friends were walking one on either side of my Lady Marden’s daughter, who pretended to be embarrassed, and was not. She had a black patch at the corner of a very suggestive mouth, and a figure that did not promise prudery. For the rest, John Gore and Barbara Purcell were left pacing side by side like two grave and staid strangers walking up the aisle of a church.