The feminine nature, facile and self-adapting, had at once accommodated itself to the dominion over all this, and all that attended it. And Miss Maubray being a lady, a girl who had, in her troubled life, been much among high-bred people--her father a gentle, fashionable, broken-down man, and her mother a very elegant and charming woman--there was no contrast, in look, air, or conversation, to mark that all this was new to her: on the contrary, she became it extremely.
The young lady was sitting at the piano when Longcluse came in, and to the expiring vibration of the chord at which she was interrupted she rose, with that light, floating ascent which is so pretty, and gave him her hand, and welcomed him with a very bright smile. She thought he was a likely person to be able to throw some light upon two rumours which interested her.
"How do you contrive to keep your rooms so deliciously cool? The blinds are down and the windows open, but that alone won't do, for I have just left a drawing-room that is very nearly insupportable; yours must be the work of some of those pretty sylphs that poets place in attendance upon their heroines. How fearfully hot yesterday was! You did not go to the Derby with Lady May's party, I believe."
He watched her clever face, to discover whether she had heard of the scene between him and Richard Arden--"I don't think she has."
"No," she said, "my guardian, Mr. Arden, took me there instead. On second thoughts, I feared I should very likely be in the way. One is always _de trop_ where there is so much love-making; and I am a very bad gooseberry."
"A very dangerous one, I should fancy. And who are all these lovers?"
"Oh, really, they are so many, it is not easy to reckon them up. Alice Arden, for instance, had _two_ lovers--Lord Wynderbroke and Vivian Darnley."
"What, two lovers charged upon one lady? Is not that false heraldry? And does she really care for that young fellow, Darnley?"
"I'm told she really is deeply attached to him. But that does not prevent her accepting Lord Wynderbroke. He has spoken, and been accepted. Old Sir Reginald told my guardian his brother, last night, and _he_ told me in the carriage, as we drove home. I wonder how soon it will be. I should rather like to be one of her bridesmaids. Perhaps she will ask me."