of gaiety. ‘Oh, Mrs. Betty,’ said he to me, ‘how do you do,
Mrs. Betty? Don’t your cheeks burn, Mrs. Betty?’ I made a
curtsy and blushed, but said nothing. ‘What makes you talk so,
brother?’ says the lady. ‘Why,’ says he, ‘we have been talking
of her below-stairs this half-hour.’ ‘Well,’ says his sister,
‘you can say no harm of her, that I am sure, so ’tis no matter
what you have been talking about.’ ‘Nay,’ says he, ”tis so far
from talking harm of her, that we have been talking a great
deal of good, and a great many fine things have been said of
Mrs. Betty, I assure you; and particularly, that she is the
handsomest young woman in Colchester; and, in short, they
begin to toast her health in the town.’
‘I wonder at you, brother,’ says the sister. Betty wants but one
thing, but she had as good want everything, for the market is
against our sex just now; and if a young woman have beauty,
birth, breeding, wit, sense, manners, modesty, and all these to
an extreme, yet if she have not money, she’s nobody, she had
as good want them all for nothing but money now recommends
a woman; the men play the game all into their own hands.’
Her younger brother, who was by, cried, ‘Hold, sister, you run
too fast; I am an exception to your rule. I assure you, if I find
a woman so accomplished as you talk of, I say, I assure you, I
would not trouble myself about the money.’
‘Oh,’ says the sister, ‘but you will take care not to fancy one,
then, without the money.’
‘You don’t know that neither,’ says the brother.
‘But why, sister,’ says the elder brother, ‘why do you exclaim
so at the men for aiming so much at the fortune? You are none
of them that want a fortune, whatever else you want.’
‘I understand you, brother,’ replies the lady very smartly; ‘you
suppose I have the money, and want the beauty; but as times
go now, the first will do without the last, so I have the better
of my neighbours.’
‘Well,’ says the younger brother, ‘but your neighbours, as you
call them, may be even with you, for beauty will steal a husband
sometimes in spite of money, and when the maid chances to be
handsomer than the mistress, she oftentimes makes as good a
market, and rides in a coach before her.’
I thought it was time for me to withdraw and leave them, and
I did so, but not so far but that I heard all their discourse, in
which I heard abundance of the fine things said of myself,
which served to prompt my vanity, but, as I soon found, was
not the way to increase my interest in the family, for the sister
and the younger brother fell grievously out about it; and as he
said some very disobliging things to her upon my account, so
I could easily see that she resented them by her future conduct
to me, which indeed was very unjust to me, for I had never
had the least thought of what she suspected as to her younger
brother; indeed, the elder brother, in his distant, remote way,
had said a great many things as in jest, which I had the folly
to believe were in earnest, or to flatter myself with the hopes
of what I ought to have supposed he never intended, and
perhaps never thought of.
It happened one day that he came running upstairs, towards
the room where his sisters used to sit and work, as he often
used to do; and calling to them before he came in, as was his
way too, I, being there alone, stepped to the door, and said,
‘Sir, the ladies are not here, they are walked down the garden.’
As I stepped forward to say this, towards the door, he was just
got to the door, and clasping me in his arms, as if it had been
by chance, ‘Oh, Mrs. Betty,’ says he, ‘are you here? That’s
better still; I want to speak with you more than I do with them’;