Three Cousins Performed at the Pianoforte for the Duke — He Asked for the Girl Turning the Pages
Chapter 8
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She said, "You are useful, Cecily. I hope you know that we are all very sensible of it."And Cecily said, "Thank you, Aunt," and dipped the pen, and her aunt went out.Ten years, and that was the warmest sentence in all of them. She turned it over afterwards for a long time, the way you turn over a coin you suspect.The twenty-second of April was clear and cold. Thirty-one people came.The chairs were set in two curved rows in the long drawing room, with the good instrument at the end—a Broadwood grand that Mr. Sowerby had bought in a rash year and that was tuned twice annually, whether it needed it or not.The Duke arrived at seven with two other men and was, everybody agreed afterwards, perfectly civil and rather hard to talk to. Honoria had put the harp in the room. This was pure theater, because nobody was going to play it, but a harp in a corner tells a story about a household, and she had it uncovered and lit.The room filled from seven, and it filled in the way those rooms do: in a slow tide of muslin and boot polish, with the Pelhams early and the Ansteys late, and old Mrs. Lambourne of Fen Ditton needing two people to get her past the step (and being one of the four who wrote afterwards to invite Miss Broome and had the invitation declined for her).Cecily was in the room for the whole of it, and nobody spoke to her for fifty minutes except to ask where things were. She knew where things were: she had put them there. She had done the chairs at 4:00 with two footmen, and had them taken up and reset once because the second row could not see past the first. And she had counted the candles herself, because Honoria had ordered forty-eight and the room wanted sixty. Twelve short, she sent to Cambridge for the twelve on her own account out of nothing, which meant going without a pair of gloves she had been putting money by for since Christmas, and she never mentioned it, and the room was properly lit.She wore the gray.At about eight, she was standing at the side of the room near the door, which is where you stand, and Georgiana came past her, white to the lips, and said, "I am going to be sick.""You are not.""I am."