Page:Lady Anne Granard 1.pdf/21

16 cold to feel, too inanimate to flirt, not a shadow had ever passed over the highly polished surface of Lady Anne's propriety. The death of Lord Rotheles's third wife, (he had himself been divorced by his second) opened a transitory vision of splendour before the eyes of Lady Anne. Her brother would of course return from Paris, she could preside over his entertainments; and how serviceable they might be made to what was now the great object of her existence—having her daughters well married! "Thank God," she would sometimes exclaim, "my girls all promise to be pretty! I can conceive no misfortune in life so great as having a plain daughter to introduce." All Lady Anne's plans about her brother's house were, however, nipped in the bud, by his marrying again. Dr. Johnson says that a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience: what he would have said of a third and a fourth I know not, unless he set it down as a case of incurable madness. The fourth Lady Rotheles was a very different person from her predecessors; she was as little like the romantic and disappointed second, as she was like the impassioned and miserable third. It was a surprise and a novelty to Lord Rotheles to have a wife without tears or reproaches—he really quite missed them. His wife and sister had too many points of