"I referred to your wife's friends and late employers, the Fergusons, of High Street. As she was married from their house, and as, of course, they will only be too glad to keep up her acquaintance, they will doubtless appear to-day. In that case, much as we should regret it, your sister and myself must decline being present. We can not possibly admit such people into our society. Isn't it so—eh, Maria?"
Maria, thus sharply appealed to, answered with her usual monosyllable.
Dr. Grey looked at his wife in a puzzled, absent way. He was very absent—there was no doubt of it—and sometimes, seemed as shut up in himself as if he had lived a bachelor all his life. Besides, he did not readily take in the small wrongs—petty offenses—which make half the misery of domestic life, and are equally contemptible in the offender and the offended. There was something pathetically innocent in the way he said.
"I really do not quite understand. Christian, what does it all mean?"
"It means," said Christian, trying hard to restrain an indignant answer, "that Miss Gascoigne is giving herself a great deal of needless trouble about a thing which will never happen. My friends, the Fergusons, may call to-day—I did not invite them, though I shall certainly not shut the door upon them—but they have no intention whatever of being on visiting terms at the Lodge, nor have I of asking them."
"I am glad to hear it," said Miss Gascoigne—"glad to see that you have so much good taste and proper feeling, and that all my exertions in bringing you—as I hope to do to-day—for the first time into our society will not be thrown away."
Christian was not a very proud woman—that is, her pride lay too deep below the surface to be easily ruffled, but she could not bear this.
"If by our 'society' you mean my husband's friends, to whom he is to introduce me, I shall be most happy always to welcome them to his house; but if you imply that I am to exclude my own—honest, worthy, honorable people, uneducated though they may be—I must altogether decline agreeing with you. I shall do no such thing."
"Shall you do, then?" said Miss Gascoigne, after a slight pause; for she did not expect such resistance from the young, pale, passive creature, about whom, for the last few days she had rather changed her mind, and treated with a patronizing consideration, for Aunt Henrietta liked to patronize; it pleased her egotism; besides, she was shrewd enough to see that an elegant, handsome girl, married to the Master of Saint Bede's, was sure soon to be taken up by somebody; better, perhaps; by her own connections than by strangers. So—more blandly than might have been expected—she asked, "What shall you do?"
"What seems to me—as I think it will to Dr. Grey"—with a timid glance at him, and a wish she had found courage to speak to him first on this matter, "the only right thing I can do. Not to drag my friends into society where they would not feel at home, and which would only look down upon them, but to make them understand clearly that I—and my husband—do not look down upon them; that we respect them, and remember their kindness. We may not ask Mr. Ferguson to dinner—he would find little to say to University dons; and as for his wife"—she could not forbear a secret smile at the thought of the poor dear woman, with her voluble affectionateness and her gowns of all colors, beside the stately, frigid, perfectly dressed, and unexceptionably—mannered Miss Gascoigne—"whether or not Mrs. Ferguson is invited to the series of parties that you are planning, I shall go and see her, and she shall come to see me, as often as ever I please."