Belinda obeyed the summons to her ladyship’s dressing-room: she found Lady Delacour with her face completely repaired with paint, and her spirits with opium. She was in high consultation with Marriott and Mrs. Franks, the milliner, about the crape petticoat of her birthnight dress, which was extended over a large hoop in full state. Mrs. Franks descanted long and learnedly upon festoons and loops, knots and fringes, submitting all the time every thing to her ladyship’s better judgment. Marriott was sulky and silent. She opened her lips but once upon the question of laburnum or no laburnum flowers. Against them she quoted the memoirs and authority of the celebrated Mrs. Bellamy, who has a case in point to prove that “straw colour must ever look like dirty white by candlelight.” Mrs. Franks, to compromise the matter, proposed gold laburnums, “because nothing can look better by candlelight, or any light, than gold;” and Lady Delacour, who was afraid that the milliner’s imagination, now that it had once touched upon gold, might be led to the vulgar idea of _ready money_, suddenly broke up the conference, by exclaiming, “We shall be late at Phillips’s exhibition of French china. Mrs. Franks must let us see her again to-morrow, to take into consideration your court dress, my dear Belinda--‘Miss Portman presented by Lady Delacour’--Mrs. Franks, let her dress, for heaven’s sake, be something that will make a fine paragraph:--I give you four-and-twenty hours to think of it. I have done a horrid act this day,” continued she, after Mrs. Franks had left the room--“absolutely written a _twisted_ note to Clarence Hervey, my dear--but why did I tell you that? Now your head will run upon the twisted note all day, instead of upon ‘The Life and Opinions of a Lady of Quality, related by herself.’” After dinner Lady Delacour having made Belinda protest and blush, and blush and protest, that her head was not running upon the twisted note, began the history of her life and opinions in the following manner:--