The Fortunes of Nigel. Вальтер Скотт

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      “Nay, then,” said Dame Ursula, “I must exert my skill in good earnest. – You must give me this pretty hand, and I will tell you by palmistry, as well as any gipsy of them all, what foot it is you halt upon.”

      “As if I halted on any foot at all,” said Margaret, something scornfully, but yielding her left hand to Ursula, and continuing at the same time her averted position.

      “I see brave lines here,” said Ursula, “and not ill to read neither – pleasure and wealth, and merry nights and late mornings to my Beauty, and such an equipage as shall shake Whitehall. O, have I touched you there? – and smile you now, my pretty one? – for why should not he be Lord Mayor, and go to Court in his gilded caroch, as others have done before him?”

      “Lord Mayor? pshaw!” replied Margaret.

      “And why pshaw at my Lord Mayor, sweetheart? or perhaps you pshaw at my prophecy; but there is a cross in every one’s line of life as well as in yours, darling. And what though I see a ‘prentice’s flat cap in this pretty palm, yet there is a sparking black eye under it, hath not its match in the Ward of Farringdon-Without.”

      “Whom do you mean, dame?” said Margaret coldly.

      “Whom should I mean,” said Dame Ursula, “but the prince of ‘prentices, and king of good company, Jenkin Vincent?”

      “Out, woman – Jenkin Vincent? – a clown – a Cockney!” exclaimed the indignant damsel.