Page:Hope--Sophy of Kravonia.djvu/64

SOPHY OF KRAVONIA in a small apartment on the other side of the river, and the family house in the Rue de Crenelle stood empty. Under some arrangement (presumably a business one, for Marquis de Savres was by no means rich) Lady Meg occupied the first floor of the roomy old mansion. Here she is found established; with her, besides three French servants and an English coachman (she has for the time apparently shaken off the spaniels), is Mademoiselle Sophie de Gruche, in whose favor Sophy Grouch has effected an unobtrusive disappearance.

This harmless, if somewhat absurd, transformation was carried out with a futile elaboration, smacking of Lady Meg's sardonic perversity rather than of Sophy's directer methods. Sophy would probably have claimed the right to call herself what she pleased, and left the world to account for her name in any way it pleased. Lady Meg must needs fit her up with a story. She was the daughter of a Creole gentleman married to an English wife. Her mother being early left a widow, Sophy had been brought up entirely in England—hence her indifferent acquaintance with French. If this excuse served a purpose at first, at any rate it soon became unnecessary. Sophy's marked talent for languages (she subsequently mastered Kravonian, a very difficult dialect, in the space of a few months) made French a second native tongue to her within a year. But the story was kept up. Perhaps it imposed on nobody; but nobody was rude enough—or interested enough—to question it openly. Sophy herself never refers to it; but she used the name from this time forward on all occasions except when writing to Julia Robins, when she continues to sign "Sophy" as before—a habit which lasts to the end, notwithstanding other changes in her public or official style. 46