and where their
appearance instantly made that sensation which is usually created by
the entrance of persons of the first notoriety in the fashionable world.
Lord Colambre was not a man to be dazzled by fashion, or to mistake
notoriety for deference paid to merit, and for the admiration commanded
by beauty or talents. Lady Dashfort's coarse person, loud voice, daring
manners, and indelicate wit, disgusted him almost past endurance, He saw
Sir James Brooke in the box opposite to him; and twice determined to go
round to him. His lordship had crossed the benches, and once his hand
was upon the lock of the door; but attracted as much by the daughter as
repelled by the mother, he could move no farther. The mother's masculine
boldness heightened, by contrast, the charms of the daughter's soft
sentimentality. The Lady Isabel seemed to shrink from the indelicacy of
her mother's manners, and seemed peculiarly distressed by the strange
efforts Lady Dashfort made, from time to time, to drag her forward, and
to fix upon her the attention of gentlemen. Colonel Heathcock, who, as
Mrs. Petito had informed Lord Colambre, had come over with his regiment
to Ireland, was beckoned into their box by Lady Dashfort, by her
squeezed into a seat next to Lady Isabel; but Lady Isabel seemed to feel
sovereign contempt, properly repressed by politeness, for what, in a low
whisper to a female friend on the other side of her, she called, 'the
self-sufficient inanity of this sad coxcomb.' Other coxcombs, of a more
vivacious style, who stationed themselves round her mother, or to whom
her mother stretched from box to box to talk, seemed to engage no more
of Lady Isabel's attention than just what she was compelled to give by
Lady Dashfort's repeated calls of--

'Isabel! Isabel! Colonel G-- Isabel! Lord D-- bowing to you, Belie!
Belie! Sir Harry B-- Isabel, child, with your eyes on the stage? Did you
never see a play before? Novice! Major P--waiting to catch your eye this
quarter of an hour; and now her eyes gone down to her play-bill! Sir
Harry, do take it from her.

'Were eyes so radiant only made to read?'

Lady Isabel appeared to suffer so exquisitely and so naturally from this
persecution, that Lord Colambre said to himself--

'If this be acting, it is the best acting I ever saw. If this be art, it
deserves to be nature.'

And with this sentiment he did himself the honour of handing Lady
Isabel to her carriage this night, and with this sentime