Cressida Read Free Page A

hectic London Season had followed, in which offers of matrimony had been showered upon her like autumn leaves and she had, as Lady Constance had approvingly noted, “come on” amazingly in the social arts.
    She had been engaged that first Season—engaged, it seemed to her now, more in order to prove to herself that, if Rossiter did not care to marry her, there were other men who did; but there had been none of that wildly magical happiness in the matter that there had been when she had been engaged to Rossiter, although the young man was handsome, the possessor of wealth and title, amiable, intelligent, and in every way the most eligible of partis. And in the end, she had cried off from the engagement, censuring herself as severely for doing so as the most conventional of dowagers might have done, but hiding her inner confusion under a coolness that had from that time forth gained her the reputation of being an accomplished and even heartless flirt.
    Of course this reputation had not deterred a long list of gentlemen from seeking the rich and dashing Miss Calverton’s hand in the years that followed, and more than one of them had carried the matter to the point that rumours of an approaching marriage had been circulated in the ton; but there had been no more engagements.
    “Deuce take it,” Cressida thought to herself with rueful severity, as she sat over the cold coffee-cups with her chin in hands, “I suppose I really ought to marry Leonard, ” who was Lord Langmere, the latest and most importunate of her suitors, a marquis, a power in the Government, a handsome man in his late thirties whose fortune equalled her own and whose tastes ran with hers towards politics, good conversation, and racing. “It is perfectly absurd to expect to feel again like a girl of eighteen loving a stranger à corps perdu ”— and than Lady Constance put her head in at the door again and demanded in a despairing voice what she was to do about the Chenevix girl.
    “Good heavens, ask her to come here for the Season, of course, if you have decided you care to go to the trouble of chaperoning her about,” Cressida said, moved to this act of charity by her remembrance of another young girl who, until Great-aunt Estella had unexpectedly endowed her with a fortune, had been just as poor as Kitty Chenevix was, and reflecting as well that Lady Constance, who had much enjoyed managing the late Mr. Jeremy Havener in his more manageable moods (which had occurred chiefly when there was no opportunity for him to wager money on anything), but had sensibly refrained from attempting to manage Cressida, who had a will of her own, would perhaps derive a good deal of satisfaction from manoeuvring Miss Chenevix into a suitable marriage.
    Lady Constance looked gratified. “So generous of you, my dear!” she exclaimed. “And I expect she will really turn out not to be a great deal of trouble, after all, for she writes a very pretty, modest letter, and does not seem to be at all a coming sort of girl. I can just recollect seeing her at that little house Emily hired one year in Bath—she is quite a martyr to dyspepsia, you know: poor Emily, that is, of course, not the child—when she was only a little thing, very fair and quiet, I recall, and with charming manners. It would be so dreary to think of her never being given an opportunity to have even a single Season in town!”
    Cressida agreed with proper civility that it would be very dreary, and, jumping up forthwith from the table, announced that she must go upstairs at once and dress, or she would be late for her appointment with Sir Octavius Mayr in the City.
    “You know I cannot approve of your calling upon a gentleman at his place of business, my dear, ” Lady Constance said, for perhaps the dozenth time since she had taken up residence with Cressida. “It would be far more proper for him to wait upon you here”—but Cressida only