attracted as much by the daughter as repelled by the mother, he could
move no farther. The mother's masculine boldness heightened, by
contrast, the charms of the daughter's soft sentimentality. The Lady
Isabel seemed to shrink from the indelicacy of her mother's manners,
and appeared peculiarly distressed by the strange efforts Lady
Dashfort made, from time to time, to drag her forward, and to fix
upon her the attention of gentlemen. Colonel Heathcock, who, as Mrs.
Petito had informed Lord Colambre, had come over with his regiment to
Ireland, was beckoned into their box by Lady Dashfort, by her squeezed
into a seat next to Lady Isabel; but Lady Isabel seemed to feel
sovereign contempt, properly repressed by politeness, for what, in a
low whisper to a female friend on the other side of her, she called,
"the self-sufficient inanity of this sad coxcomb." Other coxcombs, of
a more vivacious style, who stationed themselves round her mother, or
to whom her mother stretched from box to box to talk, seemed to engage
no more of Lady Isabel's attention than just what she was compelled to
give by Lady Dashfort's repeated calls of, "Isabel! Isabel! Colonel
G----, Isabel! Lord D---- bowing to you. Bell! Bell! Sir Harry B----.
Isabel, child, with your eyes on the stage? Did you never see a play
before? Novice! Major P---- waiting to catch your eye this quarter of
an hour; and now her eyes gone down to her play-bill! Sir Harry, do
take it from her.

"'Were eyes so radiant only made to read?'"

Lady Isabel appeared to suffer so exquisitely and so naturally from
this persecution, that Lord Colambre said to himself, "If this be
acting, it is the best acting I ever saw. If this be art, it deserves
to be nature."