During the next selection, which was a lengthy piano solo by the
fashionable Miss Nibbs, I busied myself observing all that transpired
about me. Miss Nibbs herself was worthy of some notice; perched upon
the piano-stool, her flat feet barely reaching the pedals, and her
ill-formed bulky figure swaying now on one side, now on another.
Whatever Miss Nibbs had been in her youth, and to speak truly one
might doubt at this period of her existence if she had ever known a
younger day, she certainly was very much worn and used looking in her
decline. Not even the faded remnants of an earlier grace or gentility
helped to redeem the weak points of nature about her. She was a
stranger to me, and yet I could have declared with the most perfect
sanction of my moral certitude that she was the direct descendant of a
plebeian stock. Not but that she had counterfeited patrician
attributes according to her own interpretation of them as earnestly as
she knew how; but such, empty pretensions as these are too transparent
to the all-discerning eye of true gentility. They can not easily
assume that which they have no right to claim. A haughty, overbearing
demeanor, or a powerful drawl, is no guarantee of good breeding, and
these were poor Miss Nibbs' only titles to it. I will admit that, in
my fretted mood, I saw her at her worst. Not a wrinkle of her
ill-fitting bodice escaped me, not a movement of her ungainly form
passed unnoticed, I was dissecting her to a pitiful disadvantage,
following up each new discovery with a moral of my own when a
half-subdued voice whispered in my ear:
"Spare her, Miss Hampden.
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