"I shall do very well, ma'am."
"You might do pretty well, I dare say, if you could live privately,—at Perivale, keeping up the old family house there, and having no expenses; but you'll find even that close enough with your seat in Parliament, and the necessity there is that you should be half the year in London. Of course she won't go to London. She can't expect it. All that had better be made quite clear at once." Hence had come the letter about the house at Perivale, containing Lady Aylmer's advice on that subject, as to which Clara made no reply.
Lady Aylmer, though she had given in her assent, was still not altogether without hope. It might be possible that the two young people could be brought to see the folly and error of their ways before it would be too late; and that Lady Aylmer, by a judicious course of constant advice, might be instrumental in opening the eyes, if not of the lady, at any rate of the gentleman. She had great reliance on her own powers, and knew well that a falling drop will hollow a stone. Her son manifested no hot eagerness to complete his folly in a hurry, and to cut the throat of his prospects out of hand. Time, therefore, would be allowed to her, and she was a woman who could use time with patience. Having, through her son, despatched her advice about the house at Perivale,—which simply amounted to this, that Clara should expressly state her willingness to live there alone whenever it might suit her husband to be in London or elsewhere,—she went to work on other points connected with the Amedroz family, and eventually succeeded in learning something very much like the truth as to poor Mrs. Askerton and her troubles. At first she was so comfortably horror-stricken by the iniquity she had unravelled,—so delightfully shocked and astounded,—as to believe that the facts as they then stood would suffice to annul the match.
"You don't tell me," she said to Belinda, "that Frederic's wife will have been the friend of such a woman as that!" And Lady Aylmer, sitting up-stairs with her household books before her, put up her great fat hands and her great fat arms, and shook her head,—front and all,—in most satisfactory dismay.
"But I suppose Clara did not know it." Belinda had considered it to be an act of charity to call Miss Amedroz Clara since the family consent had been given.
"Didn't know it! They have been living in that sort of way that they must have been confidantes in everything. Besides, I always hold that a woman is responsible for her female friends."
"I think if she consents to drop her at once,—that is, absolutely to make a promise that she will never speak to her again,—Frederic ought to take that as sufficient. That is, of course, mamma, unless she has had anything to do with it herself."
"After this I don't know how I'm to trust her. I don't indeed. It seems to me that she has been so artful throughout. It has been a regular case of catching."
"I suppose, of course, that she has been anxious to marry Frederic;—but perhaps that was natural."
"Anxious;—look at her going there just when he had to meet his constituents. How young women can do such things passes me! And how it is that men don't see it all, when it's going on just under their noses, I can't understand. And then her getting my poor dear sister to speak to him when she was dying! I didn't think your aunt would have been so weak." It will be thus seen that there was entire confidence on this subject between Lady Aylmer and her daughter.