She jumped about the room, assumed infantine airs, played with
Euphemia's lap-dag, fondled it, seated herself on the floor and swept
the carpet with her fine flaxen tresses; but she performed the
routine of captivation in vain. Thaddeus recollected having seen this
pretty full-grown baby, in her peculiar character of a profligate
wife, pawning her own and her husband's property; he remembered this,
and the united shafts of her charms and folly fell unnoticed to the
ground.
When Thaddeus took his leave, Miss Beaufort, as was her custom,
retired for an hour to read in her dressing-room, before she directed
her attention to the toilet. She opened a book, and ran over a few
pages of Madame de Stael's Treatise on the Passions; but such
reasoning was too abstract for her present frame of mind, and she
laid the volume down.
She dipped her pen in the inkstand. Being a letter in debt to her
guardian, she thought she would defray it now. She accomplished "My
dear uncle," and stopped. Whilst she rested on her elbow, and,
heedless of what she was doing, picked the feather of her quill to
pieces, no other idea offered itself than the figure of Thaddeus
sitting 'severe in youthful beauty!' and surrounded by the
contumelies with which the unworthy hope to disparage the merit they
can neither emulate nor overlook.
Uneasy with herself, she pushed the table away, and, leaning her
cheek on her arm, gazed into the rainbow varieties of a beaupot of
flowers which occupied the fireplace.
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