Lady Romaine would have humoured the girl’s fancy for seclusion indefinitely. She felt almost humiliated by the presence of a daughter so stately and so mature. Geraldine was nineteen, but might have passed for more, with her grave, refined beauty, and her lack of all the kittenish freakishness which made many matrons seem almost like girls, even when their charms began to fade, and nature had to be replaced by art. Lady Romaine fondly believed that her admirers took her for four-and-twenty; and now to have to pose as the mother of a grown-up daughter was a bitter mortification, and one which disposed her to make as speedy a marriage for Geraldine as could well be achieved. Lord Romaine had at last insisted that his daughter should appear in the world of fashion, and she had been once or twice to Court in her parents’ train, where her striking beauty and unwonted appearance had made some sensation. Geraldine had little fault to find with what she saw and heard there. Good Queen Anne permitted nothing reprehensible in her neighbourhood, and her Court was grave to the verge of dullness. She was a loving and a model wife; and the Duchess was devoted to her husband, though often making his life a burden by her imperious temper. Anything like conjugal infidelity was not tolerated therefore by either of these ladies, and decorum ruled wherever the Queen was to be found. But at other places and in other company matters were far different, and already Geraldine began to shrink with a great disgust and distaste from the compliments she received, from the coarse, foolish, affected talk she heard, and from the knowledge of the senseless dissipation which flowed like a stream at her feet, and which seemed to encircle the span of her life in a way that made escape impossible. But she had been taught obedience as one of the cardinal virtues, and the days of emancipated daughters were not yet. When her father bade her lay aside her mourning and join in the life of the house, she knew she must obey. But she had asked from him the favour of being permitted to design her own dresses, and to follow her own tastes in matters pertaining to her own toilet, and also that she might be excused attendance at her mother’s morning levee; for the spectacle of crowds of men flocking in and out of her mother’s apartments, and witnessing the triumphs of the coiffeurs and tire-women, was to her degrading and disgusting; and though Lord Romaine laughed—being himself so inured to the custom—and told her she was a little fool, and must get the better of her prudery, he gave way to her in this, and the more readily because she represented to him how that these morning hours were now the only ones she could command for study; and he was proud to find in his daughter an erudition and talent very rare amongst women in those days. [Illustration: The old garden was another favourite haunt of hers (page 96).]