A Fair Fraud — page 82: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A Fair Fraud 71 as a ‘good match, a man whose money and position she coveted, then Marion would go to her wncle and reveal all she had overheard. She would be guided by circum- stances. So far she had at least decided when the dinner-bell rang. There was a large party at dinner, and Marion feit very small and shy when she found herself seated at the long table with an elderly gentleman on one side of her, and the dreaded Mr Edgar Naylor, the woman-hater, whose arm she had timidly taken when he was introduced to her in the drawing-room, on the other. Yet she looked very sweet, and win- some, too, in her white, embroidered muslin dress, with some Marshal Niel roses, which her aunts maid had brought her from the con- servatory, pinned into the front of the low bodice, which now fitted her to perfection. Marion, like ninety-nine other women cut of a hundred, looked all the better for being prettily dressed—it is only the hundredth who is as handsome in shabby old dresses as in smart new ones, and even this rare and exceptional woman is unwise to trust to her charms too completely, regardless of the beautifying and perfccting influences of becoming clothes. Marion Blake at any rate ‘paid well,’ as the saying is, for good dressing. Her own taste vas excellent, and Mrs Drury had always been Goo oO C' Q)