‘Please yourself, my dear,’ returned Mr. Piper, ‘and you’ll please me.’
Thus it was that the Piper establishment had been conducted upon a strictly middle-class footing.
Now everything was on an aristocratic level. The present Mrs. Piper had a Frenchwoman for her own maid. She had a groom in top boots to sit behind her pony carriage. When she drove in her barouche the groom sat beside the coachman, and the two pairs of top-boots had a dazzling effect. Mr. Piper was rather astonished at the bootmaker’s bill.
‘My pet, here’s no end of money to pay for top-boots,’ he remarked. ‘I can’t say I see the use of ’em. Poor Moggie got on very well without top-boots.’
‘I hope you don’t expect me to go out with a coachman in trousers,’ exclaimed Bella. ‘I might as well have a fly from the “Crown” at once.’
‘My love, I should have thought that any kind of conveyance would have been a novelty to you, and that you’d hardly have been so particular about the livery,’ suggested Mr. Piper.
‘I could have gone on foot all my life,’ said Bella, ‘but if I am to have a carriage I must have it decently appointed. I don’t want to hang between heaven and earth, like Mahomet’s coffin.’
Mahomet’s coffin extinguished Mr. Piper. It had been flung at his head a good many times upon his venturing to object to his young wife’s extravagance.
‘And after all I am proud to see how well she does it,’ he said to himself, smiling an uxorious smile. ‘She’s a regular little duchess.’
And henceforward in familiar conversation Mr. Piper was apt to speak of his wife as the ‘Duchess.’