"Where were we when all this began?" cried Lady Delacour, forcing herself
to resume an air of gaiety--"O, masquerade was the order of the
day---tragedy or comedy? which suits your genius best, my dear?"

"Whichever suits your ladyship's taste least."

"Why, my woman, Marriott, says I ought to be tragedy; and, upon the notion
that people always succeed best when they take characters diametrically
opposite to their own--Clarence Hervey's principle--perhaps you don't
think that he has any principles; but there you are wrong; I do assure
you, he has sound principles--of taste."

"Of that," said Belinda, with a constrained smile, "he gives the most
convincing proof, by his admiring your ladyship so much."

"And by his admiring Miss Portman so much more. But whilst we are making
speeches to one another, poor Marriott is standing in distress, like
Garrick, between tragedy and comedy."

Lady Delacour opened her dressing-room door, and pointed to her as she
stood with the dress of the comic muse on one arm, and the tragic muse on
the other.

"I am afraid I have not spirits enough to undertake the comic muse," said
Miss Portman.

Marriott, who was a personage of prodigious consequence, and the judge in
the last resort at her mistress's toilette, looked extremely out of humour
at having been kept waiting so long; and yet more so at the idea that her