Clarice Adair Author:Randolph Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. The prospect of the London campaign before lier was most distasteful to Lady Adair. Sir Jasper also pretended to hate the thought of it, but in r... more »eality he was far from disliking the idea of a somewhat ostentatious London life. It was otherwise with his wife. Lady Adair's desire for an experience of the great world had been amply satisfied by her two seasons of early married life. She had read in novels of beauties who had only to appear to be followed by admiring crowds, and who returned home to find notes from anonymous and despairing lovers, and she was terribly disappointed to find that nothing of the kind occurred to her. People admired her—said " Sir Jasper had married a wonderfully handsome woman, cold and statuesque-looking, though "—and thosewho were introduced to her reported her as "fearfully dull," "without a word to say for herself;" so, to her bitter mortification, though certainly admired, she created not the smallest, "sensation." Now, as she was really very handsome, and believed herself to be an unapproachable paragon of beauty, this disgusted her considerably with the world, of which she had expected so much. Then too, though all her husband's relatives were kind and civil to her, they had too few interests in common to render their society very congenial to her, and one of her reasons for disliking the approaching season was that she should have to be beholden to them for the introductions necessary to launch Clarice properly in society, for naturally the acquaintances she had made more than thirty years before were of little practical service now. Another drawback to her satisfaction was that she did not conceive her daughter to be good-looking. Fully persuaded that her own type of beauty was the only perfect one, her daughter's varying colour, ...« less