One year Lady
Hampshire never quitted Leamington; another, she contrived to combine
the infinitesimal doses of Hahnemann with the colossal distractions
of the metropolis. Now her sole conversation was the water cure. Lady
Hampshire was to begin immediately after her visit to Montacute, and she
spoke in her sawney voice of factitious enthusiasm, as if she pitied the
lot of all those who were not about to sleep in wet sheets.
The members for the county, with their wives and daughters, the
Hungerfords and the Ildertons, Sir Russell Malpas, or even Lord Hull,
an Irish peer with an English estate, and who represented one of the
divisions, were scarcely a relief. Lord Hull was a bachelor, and had
twenty thousand a year, and would not have been too old for Florentina,
if Lord Hull had only lived in 'society,' learnt how to dress and how
to behave, and had avoided that peculiar coarseness of manners and
complexion which seem the inevitable results of a provincial life. What
are forty-five or even forty-eight years, if a man do not get up too
early or go to bed too soon, if he be dressed by the right persons, and,
early accustomed to the society of women, he possesses that flexibility
of manner and that readiness of gentle repartee which a feminine
apprenticeship can alone confer? But Lord Hull was a man with a red face
and a grey head on whom coarse indulgence and the selfish negligence of
a country life had already conferred a shapeless form; and who,
dressed something like a groom, sat at dinner in stolid silence by Lady
Hampshire, who, whatever were her complaints, had certainly the art,
if only from her questions, of making her neighbours communicative.
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