“’Tis delightful to see you back, dear Madam Latrobe!” said Mrs Clarissa, gushingly. “How touching must it be to return to the home of your youth, after so many years of banishment!”
Mrs Latrobe had not felt in the least touched, and hardly knew how to reply. “Oh, to be sure!” she said. “Glad to see you,” said Mrs Jane. “Great loss we’ve had in Madam. Hope you’ll be as good as she was. My sister desired me to make her compliments. Can’t stir off the sofa. Fine morning!”
When the Maidens left the Abbey—which they did together—they compared notes on the new reign.
Lady Betty’s sense of decorum was very much shocked. Mrs Latrobe had not spoken a word of her late mother, and had hinted at changes in matters which had existed at White-Ladies from time immemorial.
Mrs Clarissa was charmed with the new lady’s manners and mourning, both which she thought faultless.
Mrs Eleanor thought “she was a bit shy, poor thing! We must make allowances, my dear friends—we must make allowances!”
“Make fiddlestrings!” growled Mrs Jane. “She’s Anne Furnival still, and she’ll be Anne Furnival to the end of the chapter. As if I didn’t know Nancy! Ever drive a jibbing horse?”
Mrs Clarissa, who was thus suddenly appealed to, declared in a shocked tone that she never drove a horse of any description since she was born.
“Ah, well! I have,” resumed Mrs Jane, ignoring the scandalised tone of her sister Maiden: “and that’s just Nancy Furnival. She’s as sleek in the coat as ever a Barbary mare. But you’ll not get her along the road to Tewkesbury, without you make her think you want to drive her to Gloucester. I heard plenty of folks pitying Madam when she bolted. My word!—but I pitied somebody else a vast deal more, and that was Charles Latrobe. I wouldn’t have married her, if she’d been stuck all over with diamonds.”
“I fancy she drove him,” said Mrs Eleanor with a smile.