Lucy, meantime, was undergoing the broad banter of her unrefined
cousins on the subject of the Irish clerk. A very little grace in
the perpetration would have made it grateful to her vanity, but this
was far too broad raillery, and made her hold up her head with
protestations of her perfect indifference, to which her cousins
manifested incredulity, visiting on her with some petty spite their
small jealousies of her higher pretensions, and of the attention
which had been paid to her by Mr. Cavendish Dusautoy.
'Not that he will ever look at you again, Lucy, you need not flatter
yourself,' said the amiable Sarah Anne. 'Harry Wolfe writes that he
was flirting with a beautiful young lady who came to see Oxford, and
that he is spending quantities of money.'
'It is nothing to me, I am sure,' retorted Lucy. 'Besides, Gilbert
says no such thing.'
'Gilbert! oh, no!' exclaimed Miss Drury; 'why, he is just as bad
himself. Papa said, from what Mrs. Wolfe told him, he would not take
500 pounds to pay Mr. Gilbert's bills.'
Albinia had been hearing much the same story from Mrs. Drury, though
not so much exaggerated, and administered with more condolence. She
did not absolutely believe, and yet she could not utterly disbelieve,
so the result was a letter to Gilbert, with an anxious exhortation to
be careful, and not to be deluded into foolish expenditure in
imitation of the Polysyllable; and as no special answer was returned,
she dismissed the whole from her mind as a Drury allegation.
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