Upon this, Mrs. Harcourt, abruptly turning to me, exclaimed “O dear, you’ve got no tea!” Then pouring out a dish of slop, added, “Can you drink it?  It looks very melancholy.”

“No,” I said, “I have had enough.”

Have not you also, my Susan, had enough of this scene ?

The Blenheim visit being considered as a private one, 398

nobody went but of the Marlborough acquaintance:  though in all royal parties, the whole company is always named by the royals, and the lords and ladies of the mansions have no more right to invite a guest than a guest has to come uninvited.

I spent this day very pleasantly, in walking over the grounds which are extremely pretty, seeing a flower-garden planned by Mr. Mason, and the pictures in the house.  The two miss Vernons, Miss Planta, and Mr. Hagget, were all that remained at Nuneham.  And it was now I wholly made peace with those two ladies; especially the eldest, as I found her, the moment she was removed from rays so bright that they had dazzled her, a rational, composed, obliging woman.  She took infinite and unwearied pains to make amends for the cold and strange opening of our acquaintance, by the most assiduous endeavours to give me pleasure and amusement.  And she succeeded very well.  I could blame nobody but the countess’ sister for our reception ; I plainly saw these ladies had been unprepared to look upon us as any charge to themselves.

The royal excursioners did not return till between six and seven o’clock, when we dined with the same party as the preceding day.  The evening, too, had just the same visitors, and passed in just the same manner.

(211) i.e. the University theatre.-Ed.

(212) Colonel Digby, who from this time is always called Mr. Fairly instead of Colonel Fairly, in the “Diary,"-Ed,

399

Section9
(1786-7-)

Court duties at Windsor and Kew.

[The following section and the two sections which succeed it, relate, almost exclusively, to Fanny’s dreary prison-life in the royal household.  Of the world without the palace, of the friends whom she had left, we hear next to nothing.  The change for her was complete ; the rare visits of her father, her sister, and the Lockes, one hasty excursion to Chesington, and one delightful evening at Mrs. Ord’s, form nearly the sum total of her personal intercourse, during these eighteen months, with those whose kindness and sympathy had brightened her past years.  She complained seldom, and only to her best-beloved Susan, but there is something truly pathetic in these occasional evidences of the struggle which she was making to conquer her repugnance, and to be happy, if that were possible, in her new situation.  Dazzled by the royal condescension Fanny may have been ; blinded she was not.  It was her father who, possessed by a strange infatuation, remained blind to the incongruity, charmed by the fancied honour, of his daughter’s position; and she, tender-hearted as she was, could not bear to inflict upon one so dear the pain which she knew must be the consequence of his enlightenment.  Meanwhile, her best comfort was still in the friendship of Mrs. Delany, and this, in the course of nature, could not be of long duration.