The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 335: what you’re looking at

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

304 REYNOLDS’ WORKS gracefully down in a fit, just as an actress swoons or dies upon the stage, though with perhaps a trifle more of voluptuous abandonment of the form. Water was sprinkled upon Eg- lantine’s countenance; she suffered herself to be slowly re- covered. She then listened with admirable patience and meekness to Madame Angelique’s reasoning, and with an equal degree of exemplary resignation she yielded herself to her destiny. In the afternoon Lord Wenham came in his carriage to fetch away his paragon of virtue, and he placed her in a sumptuously furnished house which he hired for her accom- modation, with an allowance of eighty pounds per week. We may add that in the evening of the very same day on which his lordship paid Madame Angelique a thousand guineas for the beautiful Eglantine and gave the young lady the first instalment of her magnificent income, he most gen- erously and nobly forwarded a cheque for two guineas to the secretary of the Society for the Distribution of Bread amongst the Famishing Poor, and a cheque for twenty guineas to the Association for the Protection of Young Females. To return, however, to Madame Angelique. Scarcely had she effected her most disinterested arrangement with Lord Wenham, and had dismissed the paralyzed doting old noble- man, when the second of the three billets which she had despatched in the morning was personally answered by the appearance of a gentleman rejoicing in the name of Mr. White Choker. He was dressed in complete black, and wore a low cravat of snowy fairness. He showed no shirt-collar, and had altogether a very clerical look. His hair was cropped all around like a Puritan’s, and was combed sleek and straight down over his forehead. He had a long, pale countenance, the expression of which was so habitually that of sancti- monious self-martyrization and lugubrious demureness, that even when he tried to smile on entering the milliner’s boudoir he looked like an undertaker or a funeral-mute making a desperate attempt to appear gay. Very keen-sighted per- sons, on regarding Mr. White Choker more closely, might have fancied that there was something in the expression of his coarse lips and in the gleaming of his dark deep-set small eyes which denoted the strong passions of the man and the difficulty he had in concealing them beneath the gloss of assumed sanctity and hypocritical cant, but on this point ECORNIClIOO KS (E(0)