Bessie's Fortune

The table was laid in the large dining-room, which faced the south, and whose long French windows looked into the terraced flower-garden and upon the evergreens fashioned after those in the park at Versailles. When alone, Lucy took all her meals in the pleasant little breakfast room, where only two pictures hung upon the wall, and both of Robin--one taken in all his infantile beauty, when he was two years old, and the other at the age of fourteen, after the lovely blue eyes which smiled so brightly upon you from the first canvas were darkened forever, and the eyelids were closed over them. This was Lucy's favorite room, for there Robin seemed nearer to her. But Geraldine did not like it. It was like attending a funeral all the time, she said; and so, though it was quite large enough to accommodate her Thanksgiving guests, Lucy had ordered the dinner to be served in the larger room, which looked very warm and cheerful with the crimson hangings at the windows and the bright fire on the hearth.

After having regaled herself with a glass of sherry, a biscuit, a piece of sponge cake, and some fruit, Mrs. Geraldine had descended to the dining-room to see a new rug, of which Lucy told her. Glancing at the table, which was glittering with china, and glass, and silver, she began counting: "One, two, three, four, five, six places. You surely did not expect Burton's father?"

Lucy flushed a little, as she replied: "Oh, no; the sixth place is for Miss McPherson."

"Miss McPherson! What possessed you to invite her? I detest her, with her sharp tongue and prying ways. Why, she is positively rude at times, and exasperates me so," Geraldine said, angrily; and her sister rejoined: "I know she is peculiar and outspoken, but at heart she is true as steel, and I thought she would be very lonely taking her Thanksgiving dinner alone. And then she will be glad to see you and inquire after her brother's family, whom she knows you met abroad."

"Yes, we spent a week with her brother, the Hon. John McPherson, and his wife Lady Jane, at the house of Captain Smithers in Middlesex. Miss McPherson is, at least, well connected," Geraldine said, mollified at once as she recalled her intimacy with Lady Jane McPherson.

To be acquainted with a titled lady was, in her opinion, something to be proud of, and since her return from Europe she had wearied and disgusted her friends with her frequent allusions to Lady Jane and her visit to Penrhyn Park where she had met her. And Miss McPherson was her sister-in-law, and on that account she must be tolerated and treated, at least, with a show of friendship. So when she heard that she had arrived she went to meet her with a good deal of gush and demonstration, which, however, did not in the least mislead the lady with regard to her real sentiments, for she and Geraldine had always been at odds, and from the very nature of things there could be no real sympathy between the fashionable lady of society, whose life was all a deception, and the blunt, outspoken woman, who called a spade a spade, and whose rule of action was, as she expressed it, the naked truth and nothing but the naked truth. Had she worn false teeth and supposed any one thought them natural, she would at once have taken them out to show that they were not; and as to false hair, and frizzes, and powder, and all the many devices used, as she said, "to build a woman," she abominated them, and preferred to be just what the Lord had made her, without any attempt to improve upon his work. Once Lucy Grey had asked her why she did not call herself Elizabeth, or Lizzie, instead of Betsey, which was so old-fashioned, and she had retorted, sharply, that though of all names upon earth she thought Betsey the worst, it was given to her by her sponsors in baptism, and Betsey she would remain to the day of her death.