“Aye: very true. So, just to prove my rule by this exception, said I, ‘My friend, I’ll give you fourpence to go up to the top of that pyramid and be back here again in five minutes.’ He dropped his dignity—it was about all he had to drop, as I told you—and scuttled up that pyramid like a squirrel. He earned his fourpence, and I married his lordship.” Here Lady Flanders took snuff, and added, “You may live to find out, Mr. Lancaster, that you’ve been too avaricious. You weren’t satisfied with a wife; you must have a fortune into the bargain. Look out you don’t find yourself without both some fine morning.”
“Your ladyship is kind to forewarn me,” said Philip, who was always rubbed the wrong way by Lady Flanders.
“You don’t believe me: but you are a poet and a philosopher, and you comprehend the structure of the universe too clearly to see into your own domestic business. You don’t know, at this moment, what to make of your wife’s extravagance and ambition. She used to be quite different, didn’t she? And you understood her character so well, you were sure prosperity couldn’t spoil her.—They are all like that, my dear,” she continued, turning to Marion; “they load us down to the water’s edge, or below it, and expect us to dance about and mind the helm just as prettily as when we were unburdened. They don’t know our weapons; they can feel them in their hearts, or in their purses, or in what they call their honor; but they can never see what strikes them, or how they are struck. I don’t blame you, my dear: give him all he deserves: but I have a regard for you, and shouldn’t like to see you crippling yourself in the process. But you have a head to see your way, as well as a heart to feel his impositions. I shall look for you to give a good account of him a year hence. ’Tis a pity he hasn’t a title. But we may be able to get him one: I’ll see about it. I have found such things very useful.”
It was difficult to say what Lady Flanders meant by this kind of diatribes, which, indeed, were never more embarrassing than when she took it for granted that her interlocutor was sagacious enough to understand her. It was plain, nevertheless, that this awful old aristocrat possessed an uncomfortable keenness of insight; and that she generally put the worst construction on whatever she saw. Philip perceived that she enjoyed opposition, as giving her an opportunity for repartee, in which she was fatally proficient; and therefore he seldom entered into a discussion with her. But what she said about Marion, and her general tone regarding her, appealed to a certain obscure misgiving in Philip’s own mind, and made him feel more ill at ease than he would have liked to confess. He smiled as complacently as he could; but the smile was painfully superficial.
From Marion herself, meanwhile, he could obtain little or no satisfaction. He did not like to speak to her “seriously” on the subject, partly because he could not exactly define to himself what the subject was, and partly, perhaps, because he feared to discover that the subject, be it what it might, would turn out more serious than might be agreeable.
“You deserve credit for being so civil to that hideous old woman,” he would sometimes say.
“Not at all!” Marion would reply laughingly. “Lady Flanders represents the world. I am going to be a woman of the world, and so I pay court to her. She tells me a great many things ’tis necessary I should know. The objection is on my side.”
“You are going to be a woman of the world, are you?”
“La! of course. What would you have me do? I used to be very busy washing clothes and getting the dinner, in the old times; but now I have a laundress and a cook and a housekeeper, and nothing to attend to except inviting our guests and making myself agreeable to them. When we were in Hammersmith I was what I had to be; now I can be what I please; and it pleases me to be like ... other fine ladies.”
“Could you not make yourself agreeable to your guests and to me at the same time?”