"And is she not lovely?" asked Lady Laura, contemplating the distant Clarissa in a dreamy way through her double eye-glass. "I think it is the sweetest face I ever saw." "She is certainly very pretty," admitted Mr. Granger. "I was struck by her appearance this afternoon in the library. I suppose there is something really out of the common in her face, for I am generally the most unobservant of men in such matters." "Out of the common!" exclaimed Lady Laura. "My dear sir, it is such a face as you do not see twice in a lifetime. Madame Recamier must have been something like that, I should fancy--a woman who could attract the eyes of all the people in the great court of the Luxembourg, and divide public attention with Napoleon." Mr. Granger did not seem interested in the rather abstract question of Clarissa's possible likeness to Madame Recamier. "She is certainly very pretty," he repeated in a meditative manner; and stared so long and vacantly at a fricandeau which a footman was just offering him, that any less well-trained attendant must have left him in embarrassment. The next few days were enlivened by a good deal of talk about the ball, in which event Miss Granger did not seem to take a very keen interest. "I go to balls, of course," she said; "one is obliged to do so: for it would seem so ungracious to refuse one's friends' invitations; but I really do not care for them. They are all alike, and the rooms are always hot." "I don't think you will be able to say that here," replied Miss Fermor. "Lady Laura's arrangements are always admirable; and there is to be an impromptu conservatory under canvas the whole length of the terrace, in front of the grand saloon where we are to dance, so that the six windows can be open all the evening." "Then I daresay it will be a cold night," said Miss Granger, who was not prone to admire other people's cleverness. "I generally find that it is so, when people take special precautions against heat." Clarissa naturally found herself thrown a good deal into Sophia Granger's society; but though they worked, and drove, and walked together, and played croquet, and acted in the same charades, it is doubtful whether there was really much more sympathy between these two than between Clarissa and Lady Geraldine. There was perhaps less; for Clarissa Lovel had been interested in Geraldine Challoner, and she was not in the faintest degree interested in Miss Granger. The cold and shining surface of that young lady's character emitted no galvanic spark. It was impossible to deny that she was wise and accomplished; that she did everything well that she attempted; that, although obviously conscious of her own supreme advantages as the heiress to a great fortune, she was benignly indulgent to the less blessed among her sex,--it was impossible to deny all this; and yet it was not any more easy to get on with Sophia Granger than with Lady Geraldine.