Miss Grantham, who was looking very neat in a chintz gown, with her hair dressed plainly, bent over her to kiss her cheek. “Oh no! Don’t say so! I had some deep doings myself last night.”
“Lucius told me you had gone down six hundred pounds,” said Lady Bellingham. “Of course, it can’t be helped, but why would not Mr Ravenscar play faro? People are so tiresome! My love, nothing could be worse than the fix we are in. Just look at this bill from Priddy’s! Twelve dozen of Fine Hock at thirty shillings a dozen, and such nasty stuff as it is! Ditto of Claret, First Growth, at forty-two shillings the dozen—why, it is robbery, no less! Ditto of White Champagne, at seventy shillings—I cannot conceive how the half of it can have been drunk, and here is Mortimer telling me that we shall be needing more.”
Miss Grantham sat down, and picked up the bill from Priddy’s Foreign Warehouse and Vaults. “It does seem shocking,” she agreed. “Do you think we should buy cheaper wine?”
“Impossible!” said Lady Bellingham, with resolution. “You know what everyone says about the inferior stuff that Hobart woman gives her guests to drink! But that is not the worst!
Where is that odious bill for coals? Forty-four shillings the ton we are paying, Deb, and that not the best coal! Then there’s the bill from the coachmakers—here it is! No, that’s not it. Seventy pounds for green peas: it doesn’t seem right does it, my love? I dare say we are being robbed, but what is one to do? What’s this? Candles, fifty pounds, and that’s only for six months! Burning wax ones in the kitchen, if we only knew. Where is that?—oh, I have it in my hand all the time! Now, do listen, Deb! Seven hundred pounds for the bays and a new barouche! Well, I can’t think where the money is to come from. It seems a monstrous price.”
“We might let the bays go, and hire a pair of job horses,” suggested Miss Grantham dubiously.
“I can’t and I won’t live in squalor!” declared her aunt tearfully.
Miss Grantham began to gather up the bills, and to sort them. “I know. It would be horrid, but we should be spared these dreadful bills for repairs. What is K.Q. iron, Aunt Lizzie?”
“I can’t imagine, my love. Do we use that, too?”
“Well, it says here, Best K.Q. iron, faggotted edgeways-oh, it was for an axle-tree!”