'I want to know what my dress reveals to
him!' and drawing up her head, where two coral pins contrasted with
her dark braids, and spreading out her full white skirts and cerise
trimmings, she threw her figure into an attitude, and darted a merry
challenge from her lively black eyes, while Ulick availed himself of
the permission to look critically, and Sophy sank back disgusted.
'Miss Kendal can, when she is inclined, produce as much effect with
her beams of the second order as with all her splendours displayed.'
'Stuff,' said Lucy.
'Stuff indeed,' more sincerely murmured Sophy.
'Say something in earnest,' said Lucy. 'You professed to tell what I
thought of the people.'
'I hope you'll never put on such new white gloves where I'm the party
chiefly concerned.'
'What do you mean?'
'They are a great deal too unexceptionable.'
If there were something coquettish in the manner of these two, it did
not give Albinia much concern. It was in him 'only Irish;' and Fred
Ferrars had made her believe that it was rather a sign of the absence
of love than of its presence. She saw much more respect and interest
in his mischievous attacks on Sophy's gravity, and though Lucy both
pitied him and liked chattering with him, it was all the while under
the secret protest that he was only a banker's clerk.
Sophy was glad of the presence of a third person to obviate the
perils of her evenings with grandmamma, and she beheld the trio set
off to their dinner-party, without the usual dread of being betrayed
into wrangling.
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