A Georgian Pageant

On the morning of February 2nd, 1789, a lady was taking a solitary stroll in Kew Gardens. She was a small person, of dainty features, with a dimple on each side of her mouth that suggested a smile, varying, perhaps out of compliment to the variations of the people with whom she came in contact in her daily life, and shifting doubtless with the movements of the folk of her fancy through her quick brain, but remaining a smile all the time. There was about her a good deal of that doll-like primness which is so pretty an accompaniment of a person of small stature; but with this particular person it had—not quite, but almost—the additional charm of dignity. One could at all times see that she was making a highly intellectual attempt to be dignified; but that she was not really dignified at heart. One could see that she had too fine a sense of humour to be thoroughly dignified; and it may be that some of her closest observers—her closest observers were her greatest admirers—perceived now and again that she had a full sense of the humour of her efforts in the direction of dignity. She had large eyes, but being very short-sighted, she had a habit of half closing them when looking at anything or any one further away from her than ten feet. But somehow it was never suggested that the falling of her lids brought a frown to her face. She was a quick walker at all times; but on this winter day the slowest would have had little temptation to dawdle. The usual river mist was thrusting up a quivering cold hand among the gaunt trees of the water boundary of the Gardens, and here and there it flitted like a lean spectre among the clipped evergreens of the shrubberies. There was a maze of yew hedges, in the intricacies of which one mist-spectre had clearly got lost; and the lady, who had some imagination, could see, as she hurried past, the poor thing's wispy head and shoulders flitting about among the baffling central walks. (A defective eyesight is sometimes a good friend to the imagination.) And all the while she was hurrying along the broad track she was looking with some measure of uneasiness through her half-closed eyes down every tributary walk that ran into the main one, and peering uneasily down every long artificial vista that Sir Thomas Chambers, the Swedish knight and landscape gardener, had planned, through the well-regulated boskage, with an imitation Greek temple or Roman villa at the end. Approaching the widening entrance to each of these, she went cautiously for a few moments until she had assured herself on some point. Once she started and took a step backward, but raising the lorgnette which she carried, and satisfying herself that the group of men a hundred yards down one of the vistas was composed wholly of gardeners, she resumed her stroll.