"How d'ye do, Miss Oldys?" said this brilliant young man of actualities and expectations.
This Miss Caroline Oldys was just nine-and-twenty. Old, like him, in the world's dismal psychology, but with one foolish romance still at her heart; betrayed into a transient surprise, smiling in genuine gladness, almost forgetting herself, and looking quite country-girlish in the momentary effusion. It is not safe affecting an emotion with men like Cleve, especially when it does not flatter them. He did not care a farthing whether she was surprised or not, or glad or sorry. But her very eye and gesture told him that she had marked him as he stood there, and had chosen the very seat on which her partner had placed her of malice aforethought. Fine acting does it need to succeed with a critic like Cleve.
"Why,--who was it?--_some_ one told me only half an hour ago, you were somewhere in France."
"Well, if it was a man he told a story, and if a lady she made a mistake," said Cleve, coolly but tartly, looking steadily at her. "And the truth is, I wanted a yacht, and I went down to look at her, tried her, liked her, and bought her. Doesn't it sound very like a marriage?"
"That's your theory--we're all for sale, and handed over to the best bidder."
"Pretty waltz," said Cleve, waving his slender hand just the least in the world to the music. "Pretty thing!"
He did not use much ceremony with this young lady--his cousin in some remote way--who, under the able direction of her mother, Lady Wimbledon, had once pursued him in a barefaced way for nearly three years; and who, though as we have seen, her mother had by this time quite despaired, yet liked him with all the romance that remained to her.
"And who are you going to marry, Caroline? There's Sedley--I see him over there. What do you say to Sedley?"
"No, thanks--much obliged--but Sedley, you know, has seen his fate in that mysterious lady in Wales, or somewhere."
"Oh? has he?" He signed to Sedley to come to them.
Looking through the chinks and chasms that now and then opened in the distinguished mob of which he formed a unit, he occasionally saw the stiff figure and small features of his pompous uncle, Lord Verney, who was talking affably to Lady Wimbledon. Lord Verney did not wear his agreeable simper. He had that starch and dismal expression, rather, which came with grave subjects, and he was tapping the fingers of his right hand upon the back of his left, in time to the cadence of his periods, which he did when delivering matter particularly well worth hearing. It plainly did not displease Lady Wimbledon, whatever his discourse might be. "I'm to be married to Caroline, I suppose. I wish that old woman was at the bottom of the Red Sea."