courtly bearing,
with placid speculation in the eyes she cast on a foreign people, and
a voluble muteness shadowing at intervals along the line of her closed
lips.

The one person among them a little out of tune with most, was Lady Grace
Halley. Nataly's provincial gentlewoman's traditions of the manners
indicating conduct, reproved unwonted licences assumed by Lady Grace;
who, in allusion to Hymen's weaving of a cousinship between the earldom
of Southweare and that of Cantor, of which Mr. Sowerby sprang, set her
mouth and fan at work to delineate total distinctions, as it were
from the egg to the empyrean. Her stature was rather short, all of it
conversational, at the eyebrows, the shoulders, the finger-tips, the
twisting shape; a ballerina's expressiveness; and her tongue dashed
half sentences through and among these hieroglyphs, loosely and funnily
candid. Anybody might hear that she had gone gambling into the City, and
that she had got herself into a mess, and that by great good luck she
had come across Victor Radnor, who, with two turns of the wrist, had
plucked her out of the mire, the miraculous man! And she had vowed to
him, never again to run doing the like without his approval.

The cause of her having done it, was related with the accompaniments;
brows twitching, flitting smiles, shrugs, pouts, shifts of posture: she
was married to a centaur; out of the saddle a man of wood, 'an excellent
man.' For the not colloquial do not commit themselves. But one wants a
little animation in a husband. She called on bell-motion of the head
to toll forth the utter nightcap negative. He had not any: out of the
saddle, he was asleep:--'next door to the Last Trump,' Colney Durance
assisted her to describe the soundest of sleep in a husband, after
wooing her to unbosom herself. She was awake to his guileful arts,
and sailed along with him, hailing his phrases, if he shot a good one;
prankishly exposing a flexible nature, that took its holiday thus in a
grinding world, among maskers, to the horrification of the prim. So to
refresh ourselves, by having publicly a hip-bath in the truth while we
shock our hearers enough to be discredited for what we reveal, was a
dexterous merry twist, amusing to her; but it was less a cynical malice
than her nature that she indulged, 'A woman must have some excitement.'
The most innocent appeared to her the Stock Exchange. The opinions of
husbands who are not summoned to pay are hardly important;