“Did you hear me, Mr. Kennyfeck, or is it you want to pass off your dulness for deafness? Did you hear me, I say?”
“Yes, I heard—but I really do not know—that is, I am unaware how—I cannot see—”
“Oh, the old story,” sighed she—“injured innocence! Well, sir, I was asking you if you felt gratified with our present prospects? Linton's intimacy was bad enough, but the Kilgoff friendship is absolute, utter ruin. That crafty, old, undermining peer, as proud as poor, will soon ensnare him; and my Lady, with her new airs of a viscountess, only anxious to qualify for London by losing her character before she appears there!”
“As to the agency—”
“The agency!” echoed she, indignantly, “do your thoughts never by any chance, sir, take a higher flight than five per cent.?—are you always dreaming of your little petty gains at rent-day? I told you, sir, how the patron might be converted into a son-in-law—did I not?”
“You did, indeed, and I'm certain I never threw any impediment in the way of it.”
“You never threw any impediment in the way of your child's succeeding to a fortune of sixteen thousand a year! You really are an exemplary father.”
“I 'd have forwarded it, if I only knew how.”
“How good of you! I suppose you 'd have drawn up the settlements if ordered. But so it is—all my efforts through life have been thwarted by you! I have labored and toiled day and night to place my children in the sphere that their birth, on one side at least, would entitle them to, and you know it.”
Now this Mr. Kennyfeck really did not know. In his dull fatuity he always imagined that he was the honey-gatherer of the domestic hive, and that Mrs. Kennyfeck had in her own person monopolized the functions of queen bee and wasp together.