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Heaven knows what one's relatives think of one. Will you visit us? I hear you have promised your confidante, Lady Wilts. I believe she had requested my father to pay public court to her. If Captain DeWitt was to be trusted, she desired him to dance, and dance with her exclusively, and so confirm and defy the tattle of the town; but my father hovered between the dowagers.
He was precocious in all things: at a very early age he would mimic everybody; at five, he would sit at table, and drink his glass of champagne with the best of us; and his nurse would teach him little French catches, and the last Parisian songs of Vade and Collard, pretty songs they were too; and would make such of his hearers as understood French burst with laughing, and, I promise you, scandalise some of the old dowagers who were admitted into the society of his mamma: not that there were many of them; for I did not encourage the visits of what you call respectable people to Lady Lyndon.
Be-diamonded dowagers, hand-painted flappers, timid wives from Kansas, one and all seem to fall for the "My God" habit when they peer down into the Canyon. Ranger Winess did tell me of one original damsel; she said: "Ain't it cute?" I was standing on the Rim one day, watching a trail party through field glasses, when a stout, well-dressed man stopped and asked to borrow my glasses.
Such was the person who, with a habitual emphasis which dowagers found hoydenish and all young men adorable, demanded without prelude: "Heavens! What can it be, Mr. Erwyn, that has cast Mother into this unprecedented state of excitement?" "What, indeed?" said he, and bowed above her proffered hand. "For like a hurricane, she burst into my room and cried, 'Mr.
"I have thought of a plan," he continued, "which can be easily carried out. On our estate not twenty miles from here there is a little house called the Dower House a house where the dowagers of the family have generally resided. It is near Winiston, a small country town. A housekeeper and two servants live in the house now, and keep it in order.
Now and then under the smart bonnet one saw the pinched weazened face of old age, dowagers in big fur capes looking out with their dim hungry eyes on the follies of Vanity Fair.
Snooze gently in thy arm-chair, thou easy bald-head! play your whist, or read your novel, or talk scandal over your work, ye worthy dowagers and fogies! Meanwhile the young ones frisk about, or dance, or sing, or laugh; or whisper behind curtains in moonlit windows; or shirk away into the garden, and come back smelling of cigars; nature having made them so to do.
"Bless me!" cried Madge, "where am I going with no better protection than a sunshade? I'm always a little off when a horse like that is at hand. I say, Graydon," she added, in a wheedling tone, "mount and put him through his paces. I can't resist the fun, no matter what the dowagers say."
She had yachted and hunted, and bathed and danced, she had dined with the pompous Lord Mayor of London; she had hung on the braided coat sleeve of high military relics of modern antiquity, and had been kissed on both cheeks by all the wrinkled-lipped dowagers of the surrounding country.
Honeychurch, which is, I believe, a social blunder, but it pleased her, and she introduced Cecil rather indiscriminately to some stuffy dowagers. At tea a misfortune took place: a cup of coffee was upset over Lucy's figured silk, and though Lucy feigned indifference, her mother feigned nothing of the sort but dragged her indoors to have the frock treated by a sympathetic maid.
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