The young man was a great favorite with his uncle, and by no means
despised by his pretty, gipsy-faced, light-hearted, hoydenish cousin,
Miss Alice Audley. It might have seemed to other men, that the
partiality of a young lady who was sole heiress to a very fine estate,
was rather well worth cultivating, but it did not so occur to Robert
Audley. Alicia was a very nice girl, he said, a jolly girl, with no
nonsense about her--a girl of a thousand; but this was the highest point
to which enthusiasm could carry him. The idea of turning his cousin's
girlish liking for him to some good account never entered his idle
brain. I doubt if he even had any correct notion of the amount of his
uncle's fortune, and I am certain that he never for one moment
calculated upon the chances of any part of that fortune ultimately
coming to himself. So that when, one fine spring morning, about three
months before the time of which I am writing, the postman brought him
the wedding cards of Sir Michael and Lady Audley, together with a very
indignant letter from his cousin, setting forth how her father had just
married a wax-dollish young person, no older than Alicia herself, with
flaxen ringlets, and a perpetual giggle; for I am sorry to say that Miss
Audley's animus caused her thus to describe that pretty musical laugh
which had been so much admired in the late Miss Lucy Graham--when, I
say, these documents reached Robert Audley--they elicited neither
vexation nor astonishment in the lymphatic nature of that gentleman. He
read Alicia's angry crossed and recrossed letter without so much as
removing the amber mouth-piece of his German pipe from his mustached
lips. When he had finished the perusal of the epistle, which he read
with his dark eyebrows elevated to the center of his forehead (his only
manner of expressing surprise, by the way) he deliberately threw that
and the wedding cards into the waste-paper basket, and putting down his
pipe, prepared himself for the exertion of thinking out the subject.