"Very good, my dear. Then order Patient to be ready."
"Is Patient to go, Madam?"
"My dear!" said Lady Ingram, "do you think I mean to travel like a bourgeoise? Of course Patient will go. And be careful that you do not take too few gowns with you. I have to spur you, my réligieuse, or I really think you would scarce know the difference between silk and camlet. What a pity you were not born a Catholic! I will give the orders to Patient myself, that will be best. She is little better than you in such matters. I suppose, in her case, it arises from her being a Scotch-woman, and of no family. But how it ever came to be the case with you, an Ingram of Ingram, I really cannot understand. Those things generally run in the blood. It must be the people who brought you up. They did not look as if they knew anything."
"You think so much about family, Madam," said Celia, stung in the affections by this contemptuous notice of her dearest friends; "pardon me for telling you that the Passmores have dwelt at Ashcliffe for eight hundred years."
"My dear, you astonish me!" said Lady Ingram, with a faint glimmer of interest. "Then they really are respectable people! I assure you I am quite rejoiced to hear it. I did think there was something a little superior in the manner of the eldest daughter—something of repose; but you English are odd—so different from other people. Eight hundred years, did you say? That is quite interesting."
And Lady Ingram dropped another lump of sugar languidly into her cup of chocolate. Repose! thought Celia. Truly in Isabella's manners there was repose enough; but it had never occurred to the simple Passmores to regard it as enviable. On the contrary, they called it idleness in plain Saxon, and urged her by all means to get rid of it.
"Quite interesting!" repeated Lady Ingram, stirring up the sugar in a slow, deliberate style which Isabella would have admired. "Really, I did not know that the Passmores were a respectable family. I thought they were quite nobodies."
[[1]] Jonah iv. 9.
[[2]] Cor. ii. 11.
[[3]] Matt. vii. 14.