The listeners felt the position to be strained. No one had ever pressed a point on Mrs. Dumaresq before, and all the ladies thought the new boarder’s wife was audacious and ill-bred. She herself, however, was quite at her ease, though eager and interested.
Mrs. Dumaresq smiled rather acidly. “I can scarcely claim the privilege of belonging to what you call ‘the great English middle-class,’” she said. “My relations have not been in that sphere.”
“But surely,” said the new boarder’s wife, “you do not consider that you belong to the working class? That would be absurd. You are too modest. Why, business people on such a very large scale as your relatives might almost rank with professional men. My husband comes from Northampton, and I have often heard your brother spoken of as one of the most well-to-do men in the town. Does he keep on the pawnbroking business still? There was some talk of his retiring from that after he was elected Mayor.”
For a moment Mrs. Dumaresq looked as if she had received a blow. She went white and red in rapid succession, then rallied, and smiled artificially at the unconscious and unconcerned wife of the new boarder.
“I fancy you misunderstood the drift of my remarks,” she said. “And so your husband knows Northampton. Busy town, is it not? Yes, my brother does own—a—a—some business houses there, that were left to him as portion of the vast estate of—um—a wealthy relative, and, I believe that, finding them very profitable, he has allowed them to be kept on. So many people nowadays do not shrink from trade as they used when I was young. This is a democratic age, is it not?”
“Why, I thought it was your father who founded the business,” said the new boarder’s wife; but Mrs. Dumaresq had just begun to tell Mrs. Whitley of a sale of work that she had been to that afternoon, which had been opened by Her Royal Highness the Duchess of York, and she failed to hear the observation.
There was an uncomfortable silence. The prestige of Mrs. Dumaresq was rudely shaken. Then everyone began talking together, while the medical lady meditated questioning the new boarder’s wife later, and finding out all she had to tell about the family of Mrs. Dumaresq, whose superior airs had more than once irritated her.
CHAPTER XVII.
A SENSATION IN “THE STAR.”
When dinner was over, and the feminine boarders had filed upstairs as usual, a fresh shock awaited poor Prudence. There was sudden great excitement in the street. A dozen newsboys, with stentorian lungs, bellowed up and down Beaconsfield Gardens the words, “Extry Speschul—’orrible case—Re-volting details,” alone being distinctly audible.
The women crowded to the window trying to hear, and speculating what the sensation might be. Major Jones went to the front door and bought a copy of The Star, which he kindly brought up to the drawing-room for the benefit of the ladies.