“Of course,” said Jim’s mother; and involuntarily added the rider, “how stupid of one!” The Miss Champneys were matchless in putting people in the wrong. “What I should have asked was, who will perform the ceremony on the second day?”
“The wife of the member,” said Miss Champneys.
“And on the third?” asked Jim’s mother, rather obviously.
“Lady Plunket,” said Miss Laetitia.
“The wife of the brewer?” asked Jim.
Jim’s question provoked a further display of hauteur. In the first instance it was an act of presumption for a young man like Jim to have ventured to ask a question at all, and in the second he had contrived to ask the sort of question that stamped him as belonging to the neighborhood.
“Lady Plunket was a Coxby, I believe,” said Miss Champneys. She assumed an air of devastation, which was singularly becoming to one whose forebears, according to their own oral and written testimony, had first appeared in these islands in the train of the Conqueror.
“Any relation to the parson chap?” inquired Cheriton, casually.
Lady Charlotte Greg again elected to do battle.
“I am informed that Lady Plunket is a niece of the late Archbishop Coxby,” said she, in a tone and manner which for two decades had cowed the minor clergy of the diocese.