Cecy danced with us, and we enjoyed ourselves very much; I wished for dear A——­ exceedingly.  Wednesday we dined at Mrs. Mayow’s.

[My mother’s dear friend, Mrs. Mayow, was the wife of a gentleman in a high position in one of our Government offices.  She was a West Indian creole, and a singularly beautiful person.  Her complexion was of the clear olive-brown of a perfectly Moorish skin, with the color of a damask rose in her cheeks, and lips as red as coral.  Her features were classically symmetrical, as was the soft, oval contour of her face; her eyes and hair were as black as night, and the former had a halo of fine lashes of the most magnificent length.  She never wore any head-dress but a white muslin turban, the effect of which on her superb dark face was strikingly handsome, and not only its singularity but its noble and becoming simplicity distinguished her in every assembly, amid the various fantastic head-gear of each successive Parisian “fashion of the day.”  As a girl she had been remarkably slender, but she grew to an enormous size, without the increased bulk of her person disfiguring or rendering coarse her beautiful face.]

Thursday I acted Lady Townley, and acted it abominably ill, and was much mortified to find that Cecilia had got my cousin Harry to chaperon her two boys to the play that night; because, as he never before went to see me act, it is rather provoking that the only time he did so I should have sent him to sleep, which he gallantly assured me I did.  I do not find cousins so much more polite than brothers (one’s natural born plagues).  Harry’s compliment to my acting had quite a brotherly tenderness, I think.  Friday, New Year’s Eve, we went to a ball at Mrs. G——­’s, which I did not much enjoy; and yesterday, New Year’s Day, Henry and I spent the evening at Mrs. Harry’s.  There was no one there but Cecy and her two boys, and we danced, almost without stopping, from eight till twelve.

[The lads my cousin Cecilia called her boys were the two younger sons of her brother George Siddons, Mrs. Siddons’s eldest son, then and for many years after collector of the port at Calcutta.  These lads and their sisters were being educated in England, and were spending their Christmas holidays with their grandmother, Mrs. Siddons.  The youngest of these three schoolboys, Henry, was the father of the beautiful Mrs. Scott-Siddons of the present day.  It was in the house of my cousin George Siddons, then one of the very pleasantest and gayest in Calcutta, that his young nephew Harry, son of his sister-in-law, my dear Mrs. Harry Siddons, was to find a home on his arrival in India, and subsequently a wife in Harriet, the second daughter of the house.]