“My first reform will be in the sherry,—to get rid of that vile sugary compound of horrid nastiness he gives you After soup. The next will be the long-tailed black coach-horses. I don't think a man need celebrate his own funeral every time he goes out for a drive.”
“Haire,” resumed Lady Lendrick, in a tone of severity, meant, perhaps, to repress all banter on a serious subject,—“Haire not only supplies food to his vanity, but stimulates his conceit by little daily stories of what the world says of him. I wish he would listen to me on that subject,—I wish he would take my version of his place in popular estimation.”
“I opine that the granddaughter should be got rid of,” said the Colonel.
“She is a fool,—only a fool,” said Lady Lendrick.
“I don't think her a fool,” said Mrs. Sewell, slowly.
“I don't exactly mean so much; but that she has no knowledge of life, and knows nothing whatever of the position she is placed in, nor how to profit by it.”
“I'd not even go that far,” said Mrs. Sewell, in the same quiet tone.
“Don't pay too much attention to that,” said the Colonel to his mother. “It's one of her ways always to see something in every one that nobody else has discovered.”
“I made that mistake once too often for my own welfare,” said she, in a voice only audible to his ear.
“She tells me, mother, that she made that same mistake once too often for her own welfare; which being interpreted, means in taking me for her husband,—a civil speech to make a man in presence of his mother.”