He attended her to plays
and concerts three or four times a week; and when our hero thought
her sufficiently accustomed to the sight of great company, he squired
her in person to a public assembly, and danced with her among all
the gay ladies of fashion; not but that there was still an evident
air of rusticity and awkwardness in her demeanour, which was
interpreted into an agreeable wildness of spirit, superior to the
forms of common breeding. He afterwards found means to make her
acquainted with some distinguished patterns of her own sex, by whom
she was admitted into the most elegant parties, and continued to
make good her pretensions to gentility, with great circumspection.
But one evening, being at cards with a certain lady whom she detected
in the very fact of unfair conveyance, she taxed her roundly with
the fraud, and brought upon herself such a torrent of sarcastic
reproof, as overbore all her maxims of caution, and burst open
the floodgates of her own natural repartee, twanged off with the
appellation of b-- and w--, which she repeated with great vehemence,
in an attitude of manual defiance, to the terror of her antagonist,
and the astonishment of all present; nay, to such an unguarded pitch
was she provoked, that, starting up, she snapped her fingers, in
testimony of disdain, and, as she quitted the room, applied her hand
to that part which was the last of her that disappeared, inviting
the company to kiss it by one of its coarsest denominations.
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