Dilemmas of Pride. Mrs. Loudon
a very garden of Eden, of peaceful and natural delights, and yet who virtually turn themselves out of the same; and, at the mere mandate of some prejudice of society—some by-law of pride, become wanderers through the thistle-grown wildernesses of discontent, or weary pilgrims amid the thorny paths of petty mortification.
But to return to our ball: by this time so fair a proportion of the company had arrived, that it was thought advisable to commence dancing. For this purpose Mr. Salter, with a feeling of exultation which made him forget, for the time, what the whole entertainment was likely to cost, led Lady Flamborough to the head of the room. Her ladyship had evidently been pretty in her youth; but though the remains of a fine woman may sometimes be viewed with a blending of admiration with our veneration, mere prettiness seldom grows old gracefully. In Lady Flamborough's case it certainly did not. Her once nicely rounded little figure had now outgrown all bounds, not excepting those of the drapery which ought to have concealed its exuberance. Her once infantine features were now nearly lost in the midst of a countenance disproportionally increased in its general dimensions; while in manner she still played off numberless once becoming, but now disgusting, airs of artless innocence; languishing, lisping, and rolling her eyes; and childishly twisting her fingers through the ringlets of her hair, while looking up in her partner's face, and saying silly things.
Had it been possible to have checked coquetry in Lady Flamborough, the sight of the senseless bloated countenance on which she was thus casting away those interesting appeals of her visual orbs, one would have thought might have done so.
Mr. Salter's head was in shape something like a sugar loaf: the region denominated fore-head, and appropriated by phrenologists to the intellectual faculties, being so confined, that it nearly came to a point, while the descent widened as it approached the organs of gustativeness, and all that called itself face, concluded without any distinct line of demarcation, in a jole, much resembling that of a cod-fish.
The eyes were colourless, and owed all the brilliancy they possessed to an inflammation of the lids, which never forsook them. The efforts of their owner, on the present occasion, to give them a languishing roll, that should correspond with that of her ladyship's, was truly ludicrous. As to his mouth, it bisected his countenance from ear to ear, which rendered his endeavours to spread it wider by that bland movement designated a smile, nearly abortive.
A few additional lines of circular or spherical trigonometry were conspicuously marked upon cheeks that yielded in carnation hue to nought save the nose; while this rallying point of the vital powers, like certain well-known altars of the ancients, never allowed the flame to go out.
Mr. Salter was exceedingly proud of his legs, (not that he had seen them himself for the last ten years), and though short for his body, which by-the-by had precisely the appearance of a Brobdingnag melon on castors, the legs themselves, when you were distant enough to have a view of them beneath the inflated balloon that otherwise concealed them, were certainly formed according to the rules of beauty; that is to say, they had very large calves, and very small ankles.
We suppose it must have been the combined effect of the personal charms and the elevated rank of his partner, which raised Mr. Salter's spirits to so inconvenient a degree, as to produce in his mind a most frisky longing to behold, once more, this long remembered attraction of his own—his said handsome legs. Accordingly, while setting to the lady, he made several kicks out in front, with accompanying jerks forward of the head, in the vain hope of catching a glimpse; but, alas, in one unfortunate effort more strenuous than the rest, he lost his balance; out flew his feet, and down he came on his back, so much to the amusement of the whole room that no one for a time had the presence of mind to pick him up: while there he lay, sprawling and puffing, his own endeavours to rise being quite as fruitless as those of a beetle usually are, when placed in the same reversed position by a mischievous school-boy. Neither was the evening by any means one of unmixed delight to the Misses Salter. It was but too evident that even on the present occasion, when, if ever compliment was due to them, that the gentlemen evinced any thing but impatience to secure the felicity of being their partners. On the contrary, it was generally when a quadrille was nearly made up, and the last added couple were in great distress for a vis-à-vis, that some one who had previously made up his mind not to dance, was pressed into the service, and given a hint that one of the Miss Salters was sitting down.
Even Sir James, though he did dance a set with each sister, did not do so till he had been shaken off by nearly every other woman in the room.
The Scotch proverb says, "It's a lucky lass that's like her father."
But we must confess, we never could discover that it was any advantage to Miss Salter to be so strikingly like her father as she certainly was. Miss Grace Salter was altogether of a different style; she was under-sized, pitiably thin, and extremely dark, with an expression of countenance as if she had just swallowed something unseasonably bitter, and was making a face at its disagreeable flavour. The set with Sir James could not much sooth the vanity of either sister, for no sooner did he commence operations, than a ring was immediately formed for the avowed purpose of laughing at him; while he, mistaking the general attention he drew for admiration, seemed gratefully determined to spare no pains to give the greatest possible satisfaction to his numerous spectators.
The Misses Salter had also another source of uneasiness this evening. At all times their greatest earthly apprehension, next to that of not getting husbands themselves, was, lest their father should marry, and cut them out of a small sum, which not having been swallowed up in the purchase of the estate for John, he had promised to divide between them unless indeed he married again. His doing so seemed this evening more probable than ever it had done before. The roll of his eye, while looking at Lady Flamborough, had become quite ominous, while her ladyship's air of condescension was truly alarming.
"Now it would be too bad, would it not?" said Miss Salter to Miss Grace Salter, as they were undressing, "if after all, this ball that we have been so long teazing at my father to give, and that he thinks so much about the expense of, should turn out to be our own ruin in the end."
"Why, I am afraid, to be sure," replied her sister, "if he marries he won't leave us the money, or else it would be a grand connection! wouldn't it? We'd be sure to be visited by every body then."
"That we should, no doubt," said Miss Salter, "but what of that, we shouldn't have a shilling in the world, comparatively speaking, when my father dies—and as for John—"
"He wouldn't give us a shilling if we were starving!" observed Miss Grace.
By John, they meant their brother. And, by-the-by, one of the reasons, in addition to their want of beauty, why these ladies were paid so little attention to by the gentlemen, was, that it was well known, Mr. Salter had a cub of a son, on whom he meant, in imitation of his betters, to heap the earnings and savings of his life, for the purpose, as he himself expressed it, of making a family: and, for that matter he didn't see why a man mightn't be prouder of being the first of his name to do so, than if he was come of a family ready made to his hand a thousand years ago! for sure, they must all have had a beginning one time or other.
But as to being the first of his name to have a rise in the world, he was not so clear of that neither: he had often heard talk of a Lord Salter or Salisbury, or something beginning with an S; and he might become a lord, one time or other, for any thing he knew to the contrary.
But be that as it may, "he wasn't going to have his money, that he had been a lifetime scraping together, squandered by idle fellows that were nothing at all akin to him, but would just come and marry his daughters to get hold of the cash."
"But supposing, Sir, we shouldn't get married at all," said Miss Salter one day.
"Nothing more likely," replied her father. "As for Grace, she is certainly as plain a girl as I'd desire to see any day. And I don't know how it is, you're not very handsome neither, tho' you're thought so like me."
These observations of Mr. Salter's about being the first of his family were, by the particular desire of his daughters, strictly confined to his own fireside. There was no occasion, they argued, to make any such confession in a place like Cheltenham, where nobody knew anything about people, but what they choose to say of themselves. Accordingly,