She had been
all over the world with her husband, who was very handsome and almost
idiotic, and who could not have told you what the Taj was, whether Thebes
was in Egypt or India, or what was the difference, if any, between the
Golden Gate and the Golden Horn. Mrs. Trent was large, sultry,
well-informed and supercilious; had the lustrous eyes of a Spaniard, and
spoke in a warm contralto voice. Her figure was magnificent, and she
prided herself on having a masculine intellect. Her enemies said that she
had a more than masculine temper.
Lady Manby had been presented by Providence with a face like a teapot,
her nose being the spout and her cheeks the bulging sides. She saw
everything in caricature. If war were spoken of, her imagination
immediately conjured up visions of unwashed majors conspicuously absurd
in toeless boots, of fat colonels forced to make merry on dead rats, of
field-marshals surprised by the enemy in their nightshirts, and of common
soldiers driven to repair their own clothes and preposterously at work on
women's tasks. She adored the clergy for their pious humours, the bench
for its delicious attempts at dignity, the bar for its grotesque
travesties of passionate conviction--lies with their wigs on--the world
political for its intrigues dressed up in patriotism. A Lord Chancellor
in full state seemed to her the most delightfully ridiculous phenomenon
in a delightfully ridiculous universe.
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