Anne mentioned the glimpses she had had of him at Lyme, but without
being much attended to. "Oh! yes, perhaps, it had been Mr Elliot.
They did not know. It might be him, perhaps." They could not listen
to her description of him. They were describing him themselves; Sir
Walter especially. He did justice to his very gentlemanlike
appearance, his air of elegance and fashion, his good shaped face, his
sensible eye; but, at the same time, "must lament his being very much
under-hung, a defect which time seemed to have increased; nor could he
pretend to say that ten years had not altered almost every feature for
the worse. Mr Elliot appeared to think that he (Sir Walter) was
looking exactly as he had done when they last parted;" but Sir Walter
had "not been able to return the compliment entirely, which had
embarrassed him. He did not mean to complain, however. Mr Elliot was
better to look at than most men, and he had no objection to being seen
with him anywhere."
Mr Elliot, and his friends in Marlborough Buildings, were talked of the
whole evening. "Colonel Wallis had been so impatient to be introduced
to them! and Mr Elliot so anxious that he should!" and there was a Mrs
Wallis, at present known only to them by description, as she was in
daily expectation of her confinement; but Mr Elliot spoke of her as "a
most charming woman, quite worthy of being known in Camden Place," and
as soon as she recovered they were to be acquainted. Sir Walter
thought much of Mrs Wallis; she was said to be an excessively pretty
woman, beautiful. "He longed to see her. He hoped she might make some
amends for the many very plain faces he was continually passing in the
streets. The worst of Bath was the number of its plain women. He did
not mean to say that there were no pretty women, but the number of the
plain was out of all proportion. He had frequently observed, as he
walked, that one handsome face would be followed by thirty, or
five-and-thirty frights; and once, as he had stood in a shop on Bond
Street, he had counted eighty-seven women go by, one after another,
without there being a tolerable face among them. It had been a frosty
morning, to be sure, a sharp frost, which hardly one woman in a
thousand could stand the test of. But still, there certainly were a
dreadful multitude of ugly women in Bath; and as for the men! they
were infinitely worse. Such scarecrows as the streets were full of!
It was evident how little the women were used to the sight of anything
tolerable, by the effect which a man of decent appearance produced. He
had never walked anywhere arm-in-arm with Colonel Wallis (who was a
fine military figure, though sandy-haired) without observing that every
woman's eye was upon him; every woman's eye was sure to be upon Colonel
Wallis." Modest Sir Walter! He was not allowed to escape, however.
His daughter and Mrs Clay united in hinting that Colonel Wallis's
companion might have as good a figure as Colonel Wallis, and certainly
was not sandy-haired.