amt that they were impugning their sobriety by attending a play; and
above all, fine ladies armed with their fans and their essences. As a
whole, the audience was in a vastly respectful attitude--the gentlemen
tapping their snuff-boxes meditatively, and desisting in a great measure
from their loud laughter, their bets, their cursing and swearing; the
ladies only whispering behind their handkerchiefs, and moving to cause
their diamonds to sparkle, all in acknowledgment of the vicinity of the
fair and potent Lady Betty.

The play was _Venice Preserved_, and Lady Betty entered in an early
scene. Truly a fine woman--not so lovely as Anne Oldfield, not so superb
as Sarah Siddons; but with a frank, fair, womanly presence--bright,
genial, quick, passionate through the distress of Belvidera, the
repudiated daughter and beggared wife.

Dressed in the English fashion under the Georges, walked the maiden
reared in the air blowing off the lagoons within the shadow of the grim
lion of St. Mark, to such sentimental accompaniments as the dipping oar
and the gondolier, and finished off with the peculiar whims of Betty
Lumley. She wore a fair, flowered brocade, for which William Hogarth
might have designed the pattern and afterwards prosecuted for payment
the unconscionable weaver; a snow-white lace kerchief was crossed over
her bosom and reached even to her shapely chin, where it met the little
black velvet collar with its pearl sprig; her brown hair (which had
shown rather thin, rolled up beneath her mob-cap) was shaken out and
gathered in rich bows with other pearl sprigs on the top of her head;
her cheeks showed slightly hollow, but were so fresh, so modest, so
cool in their unpainted paleness, and on the smallest provocation
acquired the purest sea-shell pink which it would have been a sin and a
shame to eclipse with staring paint; the contour, a little sharper than
it had once been, was only rendered more delicate by the defect, and so
sweet yet--so very sweet; her beautiful arms were bare to the elbow, but
shaded with falls of cobweb lace; and in one hand, poised daintily
between two fingers, she held a natural flower, a bunch of common rural
cowslips. At this period of the year such an appendage under any other
touch would have been formal as the Miss Flamborough's oranges, but it
was graceful in this woman's slight clasp.

"Enchanting creature!" "Fine woman!" "Otway's devoted wife to the life!"
murmured the company, in a flut