Lord Colambre was not a man to be dazzled by fashion, or to mistake
notoriety for deference paid to merit, and for the admiration commanded
by beauty or talents. Lady Dashfort's coarse person, loud voice, daring
manners, and indelicate wit, disgusted him almost past endurance, He saw
Sir James Brooke in the box opposite to him; and twice determined to go
round to him. His lordship had crossed the benches, and once his hand
was upon the lock of the door; but 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 seemed 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.
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