And then her
caricatures--summer-lightning flashes of pencilled wit, as I heard the
Reverend SIMEON COPE describe them in a moment of enthusiasm after she had
shown us her sketch of his rival, the Reverend STEPHEN HANKINSON.
But even in those days, while she still had about her all the fascinations
of peerless beauty and fresh and glowing youth, I mistrusted her. Alone of
all the sisters she seemed to me to be wanting in heart. I heard her
several times attempt to snub her father, and once I noted how she spent a
whole evening in moody silence, and refused to play a note, for no other
reason that I could see except that Captain ARBLAST, of the 30th Lancers,
the dashing first-born of the Bishop, who happened to be spending a few
days of his long leave in Archester, devoted himself with all the assiduity
of his military nature to twirling his heavy moustache in the immediate
neighbourhood of SOPHY MAYBLOOM, and not in that of HERMIONE. Indeed, I
have reason to know that, after the guests had departed, poor SOPHY had to
endure from her sister a dreadful scene, the harsh details of which have
not yet faded from her memory. And then I remembered, too, how it was a
matter of family chaff against HERMIONE that once, not very long after she
had entered upon her teens, she had sobbed convulsively through a whole
night, because she had discovered that her juvenile arms were thin and
mottled, and she imagined that she would never be able to wear a low dress,
or shine in Society.
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