Chapter 3

Summary

On the fourteenth of April A__ D__ Lady St Clair and her interesting protégé reached London for the express purpose of producing Alixe, according to the absurd practice of the world. Mlle de Fleury was just eighteen, very beautiful on a very small scale, with a slight and almost childish figure and a face whose sparkling and varied expression struck all who saw her with admiration. Lady St Clair had proposed taking a house while in town. But she was induced to relinquish the plan by the pressing invitation of an old aunt, who had lost sight of her since her marriage and who having no children of her own, and being very fond of young people, thought it would be an agreeable society to have her niece and grandniece staying with her during a London Season. Lady Townley, widow of Sir Joshua Townley, Rear Admiral of the Red, was sitting in a magnificent drawing room in a superb house in Park Lane, when the expected visitors were announced. The dignified hostess took off a pair of gold spectacles and laid them down on the book she was reading, rose slowly and stately and walked forward (with a large green fan closed in one hand and a worked handkerchief in the other), with a step like a queen receiving her ambassadors, to her niece.

“Welcome my dear Lady St Clair, welcome to my house and home with your daughter. And double would your welcome be if Sir Joshua, poor man, was alive. He was a good friend to your father and a good husband and a good man, but we’ll not think of that just now. Won't you be seated?”

The invitation was complied with and Alixe, to whom the old Lady's attention was by no means directed, sat motionless, gazing at her with surprise. Accustomed to the simple appearance and subdued manner of her adopted mother and having always looked on her as a model of female excellence, the present object of her thoughts appeared to some disadvantage. Highly rouged and dressed, according to poor Alixe's taste, somewhat too young with false curls of the lightest flaxen, she sate [sic] upright, majestic and pompous, talking oratorically to her niece, who fatigued and exhausted, sate patiently waiting till some pause should allow her to request permission to retire and take off her hat and cloak.