The new house at Kensington was ready, and they were all in town.
The Hyde Park shrubs had been transplanted as usual, the chairs ranked in line, the grass edgings trimmed, the roads made to look as if they were suffering from a heavy thunderstorm; carriages had been called for by the easeful, horses by the brisk, and the Drive and Row were again the groove of gaiety for an hour. We gaze upon the spectacle, at six o’clock on this midsummer afternoon, in a melon-frame atmosphere and beneath a violet sky. The Swancourt equipage formed one in the stream.
Mrs. Swancourt was a talker of talk of the incisive kind, which her low musical voice—the only beautiful point in the old woman—prevented from being wearisome.
“Now,” she said to Elfride, who, like Aeneas at Carthage, was full of admiration for the brilliant scene, “you will find that our companionless state will give us, as it does everybody, an extraordinary power in reading the features of our fellow-creatures here. I always am a listener in such places as these—not to the narratives told by my neighbours’ tongues, but by their faces—the advantage of which is, that whether I am in Row, Boulevard, Rialto, or Prado, they all speak the same language. I may have acquired some skill in this practice through having been an ugly lonely woman for so many years, with nobody to give me information; a thing you will not consider strange when the parallel case is borne in mind—how truly people who have no clocks will tell the time of day.”
“Ay, that they will,” said Mr. Swancourt corroboratively. “I have known labouring men at Endelstow and other farms who had framed complete systems of observation for that purpose. By means of shadows, winds, clouds, the movements of sheep and oxen, the singing of birds, the crowing of cocks, and a hundred other sights and sounds which people with watches in their pockets never know the existence of, they are able to pronounce within ten minutes of the hour almost at any required instant. That reminds me of an old story which I’m afraid is too bad—too bad to repeat.” Here the vicar shook his head and laughed inwardly.
“Tell it—do!” said the ladies.
“I mustn’t quite tell it.”
“That’s absurd,” said Mrs. Swancourt.
“It was only about a man who, by the same careful system of observation, was known to deceive persons for more than two years into the belief that he kept a barometer by stealth, so exactly did he foretell all changes in the weather by the braying of his ass and the temper of his wife.”
Elfride laughed.
“Exactly,” said Mrs. Swancourt. “And in just the way that those learnt the signs of nature, I have learnt the language of her illegitimate sister—artificiality; and the fibbing of eyes, the contempt of nose-tips, the indignation of back hair, the laughter of clothes, the cynicism of footsteps, and the various emotions lying in walking-stick twirls, hat-liftings, the elevation of parasols, the carriage of umbrellas, become as A B C to me.
“Just look at that daughter’s sister class of mamma in the carriage across there,” she continued to Elfride, pointing with merely a turn of her eye. “The absorbing self-consciousness of her position that is shown by her countenance is most humiliating to a lover of one’s country. You would hardly believe, would you, that members of a Fashionable World, whose professed zero is far above the highest degree of the humble, could be so ignorant of the elementary instincts of reticence.”
“How?”
“Why, to bear on their faces, as plainly as on a phylactery, the inscription, ‘Do, pray, look at the coronet on my panels.’ ”
“Really, Charlotte,” said the vicar, “you see as much in faces as Mr. Puff saw in Lord Burleigh’s nod.”
Elfride could not but admire the beauty of her fellow countrywomen, especially since herself and her own few acquaintances had always been slightly sunburnt or marked on the back of the hands by a bramble-scratch at this time of the year.
“And what lovely flowers and leaves they wear in their bonnets!” she exclaimed.
“Oh yes,” returned Mrs. Swancourt. “Some of them are even more striking in colour than any real ones. Look at that beautiful rose worn by the lady inside the rails. Elegant vine-tendrils introduced upon the stem as an improvement upon prickles, and all growing so naturally just over her ear—I say growing advisedly, for the pink of the petals and the pink of her handsome cheeks are equally from Nature’s hand to the eyes of the most casual observer.”
“But praise them a little, they do deserve it!” said generous Elfride.
“Well, I do. See how the Duchess of ⸻ waves to and fro in her seat, utilizing the sway of her landau by looking around only when her head is swung forward, with a passive pride which forbids a resistance to the force of circumstance. Look at the pretty pout on the mouths of that family there, retaining no traces of being arranged beforehand, so well is it done. Look at the demure close of the little fists holding the parasols; the tiny alert thumb, sticking up erect against the ivory stem as knowing as can be, the satin of the parasol invariably matching the complexion of the face beneath it, yet seemingly by an accident, which makes the thing so attractive. There’s the red book lying on the opposite seat, bespeaking the vast numbers of their acquaintance. And I particularly admire the aspect of that abundantly daughtered woman on the other side—I mean her look of unconsciousness that the girls are stared at by the walkers, and above all the look of the girls themselves—losing their gaze in the depths of handsome men’s eyes without appearing to notice whether they are observing masculine eyes or the leaves of the trees. There’s praise for you. But I am only jesting, child—you know that.”
“Piph‑ph‑ph—how warm it is, to be sure!” said
