Sepia was the daughter of a clergyman, an uncle of Lady Malice,
whose sons had all gone to the bad, and whose daughters had all
vanished from society. Shortly before the time at which my
narrative begins, one of the latter, however, namely Sepia, the
youngest, had reappeared, a fragment of the family wreck,
floating over the gulf of its destruction. Nobody knew with any
certainty where she had been in the interim: nobody at
Durnmelling knew anything but what she chose to tell, and that
was not much. She said she had been a governess in Austrian
Poland and Russia. Lady Margaret had become reconciled to her
presence, and Hesper attached to her.
Of the men who, as I have said, admired her, some felt a peculiar
enchantment in what they called her ugliness; others declared her
devilish handsome; and some shrank from her as if with an
undefined dread of perilous entanglement, if she should but catch
them looking her in the face. Among some of them she was known as
Lucifer, in antithesis to Hesper: they meant the Lucifer of
darkness, not the light-bringer of the morning.
The ladies, on their part, especially Hesper, were much pleased
with Mary. The simplicity of her address and manner, the pains
she took to find the exact thing she wanted, and the modest
decision with which she answered any reference to her, made
Hesper even like her. The most artificially educated of women is
yet human, and capable of even more than liking a fellow-creature
as such.
Pages:
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36