Vanity Fair - Page 167/573

Whenever there was a chance of meeting him in Russell Square, that

simple and good-natured young woman was quite in a flurry to see her

dear Misses Osborne. She went to great expenses in new gowns, and

bracelets, and bonnets, and in prodigious feathers. She adorned her

person with her utmost skill to please the Conqueror, and exhibited all

her simple accomplishments to win his favour. The girls would ask her,

with the greatest gravity, for a little music, and she would sing her

three songs and play her two little pieces as often as ever they asked,

and with an always increasing pleasure to herself. During these

delectable entertainments, Miss Wirt and the chaperon sate by, and

conned over the peerage, and talked about the nobility.

The day after George had his hint from his father, and a short time

before the hour of dinner, he was lolling upon a sofa in the

drawing-room in a very becoming and perfectly natural attitude of

melancholy. He had been, at his father's request, to Mr. Chopper in

the City (the old-gentleman, though he gave great sums to his son,

would never specify any fixed allowance for him, and rewarded him only

as he was in the humour). He had then been to pass three hours with

Amelia, his dear little Amelia, at Fulham; and he came home to find his

sisters spread in starched muslin in the drawing-room, the dowagers

cackling in the background, and honest Swartz in her favourite

amber-coloured satin, with turquoise bracelets, countless rings,

flowers, feathers, and all sorts of tags and gimcracks, about as

elegantly decorated as a she chimney-sweep on May-day.

The girls, after vain attempts to engage him in conversation, talked

about fashions and the last drawing-room until he was perfectly sick of

their chatter. He contrasted their behaviour with little Emmy's--their

shrill voices with her tender ringing tones; their attitudes and their

elbows and their starch, with her humble soft movements and modest

graces. Poor Swartz was seated in a place where Emmy had been

accustomed to sit. Her bejewelled hands lay sprawling in her amber

satin lap. Her tags and ear-rings twinkled, and her big eyes rolled

about. She was doing nothing with perfect contentment, and thinking

herself charming. Anything so becoming as the satin the sisters had

never seen.

"Dammy," George said to a confidential friend, "she looked like a China

doll, which has nothing to do all day but to grin and wag its head. By

Jove, Will, it was all I I could do to prevent myself from throwing the

sofa-cushion at her." He restrained that exhibition of sentiment,

however.

The sisters began to play the Battle of Prague. "Stop that d----

thing," George howled out in a fury from the sofa. "It makes me mad.

You play us something, Miss Swartz, do. Sing something, anything but

the Battle of Prague."