Fanny set her lips, and her eyes looked half triumphantly at her sister.
'A son of two or three-and-twenty. He is a little gay, a thing Society
is accustomed to in young men, and he is very impressible. Perhaps he
inherits that misfortune. I am very impressible myself, by nature. The
weakest of creatures--my feelings are touched in a moment.'
She said all this, and everything else, as coldly as a woman of snow;
quite forgetting the sisters except at odd times, and apparently
addressing some abstraction of Society; for whose behoof, too, she
occasionally arranged her dress, or the composition of her figure upon
the ottoman. 'So he is very impressible. Not a misfortune in our natural state I dare
say, but we are not in a natural state. Much to be lamented, no doubt,
particularly by myself, who am a child of nature if I could but show it;
but so it is. Society suppresses us and dominates us--Bird, be quiet!'
The parrot had broken into a violent fit of laughter, after twisting
divers bars of his cage with his crooked bill, and licking them with his
black tongue.
'It is quite unnecessary to say to a person of your good sense, wide
range of experience, and cultivated feeling,' said Mrs Merdle from her
nest of crimson and gold--and there put up her glass to refresh her
memory as to whom she was addressing,--'that the stage sometimes has
a fascination for young men of that class of character. In saying the
stage, I mean the people on it of the female sex. Therefore, when I
heard that my son was supposed to be fascinated by a dancer, I knew what
that usually meant in Society, and confided in her being a dancer at the
Opera, where young men moving in Society are usually fascinated.'
She passed her white hands over one another, observant of the sisters
now; and the rings upon her fingers grated against each other with a
hard sound. 'As your sister will tell you, when I found what the theatre was I was
much surprised and much distressed. But when I found that your sister,
by rejecting my son's advances (I must add, in an unexpected manner),
had brought him to the point of proposing marriage, my feelings were
of the profoundest anguish--acute.' She traced the outline of her left
eyebrow, and put it right.
'In a distracted condition, which only a mother--moving in Society--can
be susceptible of, I determined to go myself to the theatre, and
represent my state of mind to the dancer. I made myself known to your
sister. I found her, to my surprise, in many respects different from
my expectations; and certainly in none more so, than in meeting me
with--what shall I say--a sort of family assertion on her own part?' Mrs
Merdle smiled. 'I told you, ma'am,' said Fanny, with a heightening colour, 'that
although you found me in that situation, I was so far above the rest,
that I considered my family as good as your son's; and that I had a
brother who, knowing the circumstances, would be of the same opinion,
and would not consider such a connection any honour.'