Part 48 (1/2)

”Don't I just?” returns he, fervently, rising to enforce his words.

”Now, don't be sillier than you can help,” murmurs she, with a lovely smile. ”Don't! I like that gown myself, you know: it makes me look so nice and old, and that.”

”If I were a little girl like you,” says Mr. Brans...o...b.., ”I should rather hanker after looking nice and young.”

”But not too much so: it is frivolous when one is once married.” This pensively, and with all the air of one who has long studied the subject.

”Is it? Of course you know best, your experience being greater than mine,” says Dorian, meekly, ”but, just for choice, I prefer youth to anything else.”

”Do you? Then I suppose I had better wear white.”

”Yes, do. One evening, in Paris, you wore a white gown of some sort, and I dreamt of you every night for a week afterwards.”

”Very well. I shall give you a chance of dreaming of me again,” says Georgie, with a carefully suppressed sigh, that is surely meant for the beloved olive gown.

The sigh is wasted. When she does don the white gown so despised, she is so perfect a picture that one might well be excused for wasting seven long nights in airy visions filled all with her. Some wild artistic marguerites are in her bosom (she plucked them herself from out the meadow an hour agone); her lips are red, and parted; her hair, that is loosely knotted, and hangs low down, betraying the perfect shape of her small head, is ”yellow, like ripe corn.” She smiles as she places her hand in Dorian's and asks him how she looks; while he, being all too glad because of her excessive beauty, is very slow to answer her. In truth, she is ”like the snow-drop fair, and like the primrose sweet.”

At the castle she creates rather a sensation. Many, as yet, have not seen her; and these stare at her placidly, indifferent to the fact that breeding would have it otherwise.

”What a peculiarly pretty young woman,” says the duke, half an hour after her arrival, staring at her through his gla.s.ses. He had been absent when she came, and so is only just now awakened to a sense of her charms.

”Who?--what?” says the d.u.c.h.ess, vaguely, she being the person he has rashly addressed. She is very fat, very unimpressionable, and very fond of argument. ”Oh! over there. I quite forget who she is. But I do see that Alfred is making himself, as usual, supremely ridiculous with her. With all his affected devotion to Helen, he runs after every fresh face he sees.”

”'There's nothing like a plenty,'” quotes the duke, with a dry chuckle at his own wit; indeed he prides himself upon having been rather a ”card” in his day, and anything but a ”k'rect” one, either.

”Yes, there is,--there is propriety,” responds the d.u.c.h.ess, in an awful tone.

”That wouldn't be a bit like it,” says the duke, still openly amused at his own humor; after which--thinking it, perhaps, safer to withdraw while there is yet time--he saunters off to the left, and, as he has a trick of looking over his shoulder while walking, nearly falls into Dorian's arms at the next turn.

”Ho, hah!” says his Grace, pulling himself up very shortly, and glancing at his stumbling-block to see if he can identify him.

”Why, it is you, Brans...o...b..,” he says, in his usual cheerful, if rather fussy, fas.h.i.+on. ”So glad to see you!--so glad.” He has made exactly this remark to Dorian every time he has come in contact with him during the past twenty years and more. ”By the by, I dare say you can tell me,--who is that pretty child over there, with the white frock and the blue eyes?”

”That pretty child in the frock is my wife,” says Brans...o...b.., laughing.

”Indeed! Dear me! dear me! I beg your pardon. My dear boy, I congratulate you. Such a face,--like a Greuze; or a--h'm--yes.” Here he grows slightly mixed. ”You must introduce me, you know. One likes to do homage to beauty. Why, where could you have met her in this exceedingly deficient county, eh? But you were always a sly dog, eh?”

The old gentleman gives him a playful slap on his shoulder, and then, taking his arm, goes with him across the lawn to where Georgie is standing talking gayly to Lord Alfred.

The introduction is gone through, and Georgie makes her very best bow, and blushes her very choicest blush; but the duke will insist upon shaking hands with her, whereupon, being pleased, she smiles her most enchanting smile.

”So glad to make your acquaintance. Missed you on your arrival,” says the duke, genially. ”Was toiling through the conservatories, I think, with Lady Loftus. Know her? Stout old lady, with feathers over her nose. She always will go to hot places on hot days.”

”I wish she would go to a final hot place, as she affects them so much,” says Lord Alfred, gloomily. ”I can't bear her; she is always coming here bothering me about that abominable boy of hers in the Guards, and I never know what to say to her.”

”Why don't you learn it up at night and say it to her in the morning?”

says Mrs. Brans...o...b.., brightly. ”_I_ should know what to say to her at once.”

”Oh! I dare say,” says Lord Alfred. ”Only that doesn't help me, you know, because _I_ don't.”

”Didn't know who you were, at first, Mrs. Brans...o...b..,” breaks in the duke. ”Thought you were a little girl--eh?--eh?”--chuckling again.