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.




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