sitor; for Lady Cicely was Languor in person--her hair
whitey-brown, her face a fine oval, but almost colorless; her eyes
a pale gray, her neck and hands incomparably white and beautiful--a
lymphatic young lady, a live antidote to emotion. However, Rosa's
beauty, timidity, and undisguised affectionateness were something so
different from what she was used to in the world of fashion, that she
actually smiled, and held out both her hands a little way. Rosa seized
them, and pressed them; they left her; and remained passive and limp.

"O Lady Cicely," said Rosa, "how kind of you to come."

"How kind of you to send to me," was the polite, but perfectly cool
reply. "But how you are gwown, and--may I say impwoved?--You la petite
Lusignan! It is incwedible," lisped her ladyship, very calmly.

"I was only a child," said Rosa. "You were always so beautiful and tall,
and kind to a little monkey like me. Oh, pray sit down, Lady Cicely, and
talk of old times."

She drew her gently to the sofa, and they sat down hand in hand; but
Lady Cicely's high-bred reserve made her a very poor gossip about
anything that touched herself and her family; so Rosa, though no
egotist, was drawn into talking about herself more than she would have
done had she deliberately planned the conversation. But here was an old
school-fellow, and a singularly polite listener, and so out came her
love, her genuine happiness, her particular griefs, and especially the
crowning grievance, no society, moped to death, etc.

Lady Cicely could hardly understand the sentiment in a woman who so
evidently loved her husband. "Society!" said she, after due reflection,
"why, it is a boa." (And here I may as well explain that Lady Cicely
spoke certain words falsely, and others affectedly; and as for the
letter r, she could say it if she made a hearty effort, but was
generally too lazy to throw her leg over it.) "Society! I'm dwenched
to death with it. If I could only catch fiah like other women, and
love somebody, I would much rather have a tete-a-tete with him than
go teawing about all day and all night, from one unintwisting cwowd
to another. To be sure," said she, puzzling the matter out, "you are a
beauty, and would be more looked at."

"The idea! and--oh no! no! it is not that. But even in the country we
had always some society."

"Well, dyar, believe me, with your appeawance, you can have as much
society as you please; but it will boa you to death, as it does me, a