Читать книгу The Diary and Collected Letters of Madame D'Arblay, Frances Burney - Frances Burney - Страница 83

Oct. 30.—Lady Warren is immensely tall, and extremely beautiful; she is now but just nineteen, though she has been married two or three years. She is giddy, gay, chatty, good-humoured, and a little affected; she hazards all that occurs to her, seems to think the world at her feet, and is so young and gay and handsome that she is not much mistaken. She is, in short, an inferior Lady Honoria Pemberton;¹²⁴ somewhat beneath her in parts and understanding, but strongly in that class of character. I had no conversation with her myself; but her voice is loud and deep, and all she said was for the whole room.

Marriages being talked of, “I’ll tell you,” cried she, “a story; that is, it sha’n’t be a story, but a fact. A lady of my acquaintance, who had 50,000L. fortune, ran away to Scotland with a gentleman she liked vastly; so she was a little doubtful of him, and had a mind to try him: so when they stopped to dine, and change horses, and all that, she said, ‘Now, as I have a great regard for you, I dare say you have for me—so I will tell you a secret: I have got no fortune at all, in reality, but only 5,000 pounds; for all the rest is a mere pretence: but if you like me for myself, and not for my fortune, you won’t mind that.’ So the gentleman said, ‘Oh, I don’t regard it at all, and you are the same charming angel that ever you was,’ and all those sort of things that people say to one, and then went out to see about the chaise. So he did not come back; but when dinner was ready, the lady said ‘Pray, where is he?’ ‘Lor, ma’am,’ said they, ‘why, that gentleman has been gone ever so long!’ So she came back by herself; and now she’s married to somebody else, and has her 50,000 pounds fortune all safe.”