The Celebrity at Home by Violet Hunt

Author:Violet Hunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620133552
Publisher: Duke Classics

Chapter XIII

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Lady Scilly came to Whitby and took a big house in St. Hilda's Terrace.

"They can't be parted long, poor things!" Aunt Gerty said, and Mother hushed her. She brought her great friend Miss Irene Lauderdale with her, for a good blow, before she went to America.

Then all the shops came out with portraits of Irene, in "smalls" as Dick Turpin, and Irene as "The Pumpeydore," and Irene as Greek Slave, and Irene in Venus. They had her on picture postcards too in all the principal stationers' windows. I should have thought she would have been ashamed to walk down the street, hung with her own likeness like a row of looking-glasses that reflected her. But these very languid—what Aunt Gerty calls "la-di-dah" sort of people—can stand anything, so long as it's public.

When she wasn't dressed up as Turpin or Pompadour or Venus, she was just a tall, thin, and ragged-looking woman. She had red lips that stuck out a long, long way, and crinkly red hair, and large eyes like two gig-lamps coming at you down the street. She generally had a dog with her, and its lead kept getting twisted round the wheels of carts, and round my father's legs as he walked along Skinner Street beside her. He wouldn't have stood that from any one but a popular favourite.

I was walking along behind them a few days after she came, with Aunt Gerty. They stopped at Truelove's and looked at the picture-postcards. She became very serious all at once.

"I must go in and procure Myself!" she said to George, sniggling. In they went, and Aunt Gerty and I walked in after them. Mrs. Truelove's shop and library are very dark. As for the morality of it, we had as good a right to buy picture-postcards as they, and, as I had ascertained from other rencounters of this kind, George knows very well how to ignore his family when needful for his policy. I do not resent it, for one never knows how a daughter's presence may interfere with a father's plans and arrangements, and I am sure I don't want to injure his sales!

Irene turned over all the cards, including the Venus set, and did not approve of them, especially of the ones where she is turning away her face altogether.

"The blighted idiot!" she said, meaning I suppose the photographer, "has completely missed my beautiful Botticelli back! The effect is decidedly meretricious. I am a very good woman. Ah, these are better!"

She had got hold of some of herself in a spoon bonnet and long jacket, and she sang out loud, while Aunt Gerty's open mouth betrayed her shock at her audacity—

"Oh, I'm Contrition Eliza,

And she's Salvation Jane.

We once were wrong, we now are right,

We'll never go wrong again."

"I can't quite promise that, alas! My friends won't let me. I will send Salvation Jane to Lord R—y, a very dear old friend of mine. A dozen dozen, please; isn't that a gross? Oh, what a naughty word! Will you pay, Mr.

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