“Lady Delacour, the comic muse!” exclaimed he.  “I had thought——­”

“No matter what you thought!” interrupted her ladyship.  “Let my carriage draw up, and put this lady into it!” And he obeyed without uttering a syllable.

“Dry up your tears, keep on your mask, and elbow your way through the crowd,” she said, when she had heard Belinda’s story.  “If you stop to be civil and ‘hope I don’t hurt ye,’ you will be trod underfoot.”

She insisted on driving to the Pantheon instead of going home, but to Belinda the night seemed long and dull.  The masquerade had no charm to keep her thoughts from the conversation that had given her so much pain.

II.—­Fashion and Fortitude

“How happy you are, Lady Delacour!” she said, when they got into the carriage to go home.  “How happy to have such an amazing flow of spirits!”

And then she learnt the reason of her ladyship’s strange unevenness of temper.  She was dying of an incurable complaint, which she kept hidden from all the world except her maid, Marriott, who attended on her in a mysterious cabinet full of medicines and linen rags, the door of which she had hitherto kept locked.

“You are shocked, Belinda,” said she, “but as yet you have seen nothing.  Look here!” And baring one half of her bosom, she revealed a hideous spectacle.

“Am I humbled?  Am I wretched enough?” she asked.  “No matter.  I will die as I have lived, the envy and admiration of the world.  Promise—­swear to me that you will never reveal what you have seen to-night!” And Belinda promised not only that, but to remain with her as long as ever she wished.

Belinda’s quiet avoidance of Clarence Hervey made him begin to believe that she might not be “a compound of art and affectation,” and he was mortified to find that, though she joined with ease and dignity in the general conversation with the others, her manner to him was grave and reserved.  To divert her, he declared he was convinced he was as well able to manage a hoop as any woman in England, except Lady Delacour; accordingly he was dressed by Marriott, and made his entree with very composed assurance and grace, being introduced as the Countess de Pomenars to the purblind dowager, Lady Boucher, who had come to call.  He managed his part well, speaking French and broken English, until Lady Delacour dexterously let down Belinda’s beautiful tresses, and, calling the French lady to admire la belle chevelure, artfully let fall her comb.

Totally forgetting his hoop and his character, he stooped to pick it up, and lost his wager by knocking over a music-stand.  He would have liked a lock of her hair, but she refused with a modest, graceful dignity; she was glad she had done so later when a tress of hair dropped from his pocket-book, and his confusion showed her he was extremely interested about the person to whom it belonged.

During her absence from the room Clarence entreated Lady Delacour to make his peace with her.  She consented on condition that he found her a pair of horses from Tattersall’s, on which Belinda, she said, had secretly set her heart.  He was vexed to find Belinda had so little delicacy, and relapsed into his former opinion of Mrs. Stanhope’s niece, addressing her with the air of a man of gallantry, who thought his peace had been cheaply made.