Page:Blanchard on L. E. L.pdf/98

98 Fancy yourself ascending a staircase twice the height of Miss Lance's; you will then arrive at a huge door. You enter through a little ante-chamber, hung with dark-brown paper, with an orange border, a piano and some chairs being all the furniture. This leads on one side to my room; on the other to the salon, which is hung with blue paper, or rather purple, and has a balcony looking down on a delightful garden. If you furnish this room with a sofa, whose cushions are stuffed with hay, equally hard and sweet, chairs covered with blue velvet, a marble table, a secretaire, two vases filled with flowers, another table covered with books, and myself writing to you, you will have an exact idea of my present position.

"I have seen a good many strangers, and it would take a quire of paper to detail all the little agonies I have suffered from them, all the little 'states' that I have been in. Though all my life I have lived in society, and had to make my own way, I never get accustomed to doing it. I am unconquerably irresolute and shy. The utmost that I can do, and that by force of long habit, is to conceal my embarrassment, and to feel it, for that very concealment, all the more. What hesitation and difficulty does it always cost me to enjoy! . . . . I cannot tell you half the flattering kindness I have met with. M. Odillon Barrot appears to be about thirty; has the most kind, gentle, and encouraging manners; and, perhaps, of all I have seen here, is the one to whom I would apply the term gentlemanlike. He is, you know, a most distinguished person; and, you do not know, has beautiful blue eyes. He went with us, yesterday, to the Pantheon; without an exception, the finest building I ever saw. We ascended some thousands