Vanity Fair - Page 228/573

"I hope there will be no women besides our own party," Lady Bareacres

said, after reflecting upon the invitation which had been made, and

accepted with too much precipitancy.

"Gracious Heaven, Mamma--you don't suppose the man would bring his

wife," shrieked Lady Blanche, who had been languishing in George's arms

in the newly imported waltz for hours the night before. "The men are

bearable, but their women--"

"Wife, just married, dev'lish pretty woman, I hear," the old Earl said.

"Well, my dear Blanche," said the mother, "I suppose, as Papa wants to

go, we must go; but we needn't know them in England, you know." And so,

determined to cut their new acquaintance in Bond Street, these great

folks went to eat his dinner at Brussels, and condescending to make him

pay for their pleasure, showed their dignity by making his wife

uncomfortable, and carefully excluding her from the conversation. This

is a species of dignity in which the high-bred British female reigns

supreme. To watch the behaviour of a fine lady to other and humbler

women, is a very good sport for a philosophical frequenter of Vanity

Fair.

This festival, on which honest George spent a great deal of money, was

the very dismallest of all the entertainments which Amelia had in her

honeymoon. She wrote the most piteous accounts of the feast home to

her mamma: how the Countess of Bareacres would not answer when spoken

to; how Lady Blanche stared at her with her eye-glass; and what a rage

Captain Dobbin was in at their behaviour; and how my lord, as they came

away from the feast, asked to see the bill, and pronounced it a d----

bad dinner, and d---- dear. But though Amelia told all these stories,

and wrote home regarding her guests' rudeness, and her own

discomfiture, old Mrs. Sedley was mightily pleased nevertheless, and

talked about Emmy's friend, the Countess of Bareacres, with such

assiduity that the news how his son was entertaining peers and

peeresses actually came to Osborne's ears in the City.

Those who know the present Lieutenant-General Sir George Tufto, K.C.B.,

and have seen him, as they may on most days in the season, padded and

in stays, strutting down Pall Mall with a rickety swagger on his

high-heeled lacquered boots, leering under the bonnets of passers-by,

or riding a showy chestnut, and ogling broughams in the Parks--those

who know the present Sir George Tufto would hardly recognise the daring

Peninsular and Waterloo officer. He has thick curling brown hair and

black eyebrows now, and his whiskers are of the deepest purple. He was

light-haired and bald in 1815, and stouter in the person and in the

limbs, which especially have shrunk very much of late. When he was

about seventy years of age (he is now nearly eighty), his hair, which

was very scarce and quite white, suddenly grew thick, and brown, and

curly, and his whiskers and eyebrows took their present colour.

Ill-natured people say that his chest is all wool, and that his hair,

because it never grows, is a wig. Tom Tufto, with whose father he

quarrelled ever so many years ago, declares that Mademoiselle de

Jaisey, of the French theatre, pulled his grandpapa's hair off in the

green-room; but Tom is notoriously spiteful and jealous; and the

General's wig has nothing to do with our story.