The house—which had now become his freehold—was made so fine that Mr. Piper hardly knew himself in it. Persian carpets of vivid and various hues were spread on the black and white marble of the hall, brocaded satin curtains, violet lined with amber, veiled the doors between hall and conservatory. The drawing-room was pale blue and gold, rich in easy chairs and tall gilded stands supporting Sèvres vases filled with flowers.
The chief bedroom was apple-green. Everything was radiant and smiling, dazzling with gold and colour.
‘My word! it’s like living in a bower,’ said Mr. Piper, and he hummed a song that was then not quite forgotten—
‘There’s a bower of roses by Bendemeer’s stream.’
Having made her house beautiful, Mrs. Piper’s next desire naturally was to exhibit her splendour to the envious eyes of people with inferior houses. She therefore began to issue invitations on as large a scale as the neighbourhood allowed. These were not all responded to as cordially as she would have wished. Lady Jane Gowry had honoured Bella with a condescending call, but she flatly declined Mr. and Mrs. Piper’s invitation to dinner, on the ground that at her age she could not afford to extend the circle of her visiting acquaintance.
‘The people I dine with are people I have known for half a century,’ she wrote to Mrs. Piper. ‘I am too old to go out often, so I only go to very old friends. But if you and Mr. Piper like to come and take a cup of tea with me any Tuesday evening I shall be very happy to see you.’
‘After all, Lady Jane’s chestnut wig and violet-powdered complexion are not much loss,’ said Bella.
‘No, they ain’t, but I should like to have taken the old woman to dinner upon my arm, before the Porkmans and the Wigzells,’ remarked Mr. Piper. ‘I don’t believe they ever sat down to dinner with a title in the whole course of their natural lives. Wouldn’t old Timperley have stared! Earls’ daughters don’t come his way often, I reckon.’
Bella found that she would have to content herself in a great measure with the society of the Timperleys, the Porkmans, the Wigzells, and all the ramifications of those family trees. Everybody in this set was rich, and the chief struggle of everybody’s life seemed to be to spend more money upon display than his or her neighbour. The men boasted of their cellars, and vied with each other in giving high prices for their wines. A few loftier spirits bought pictures, and talked patronizingly of their favourite Royal Academicians. They seemed to think that Frith and Millais had been created for them, like Holbein for Henry the Eighth, or Vandyke for Charles the First. They all lived in brand-new houses within a few miles of Great Yafford, houses built by themselves, all spick and span and fresh from the builder’s hand, with not so much as an elderly apple-tree on the premises.
The county people had been condescendingly civil to the new Mrs. Piper; but that was all. They called upon her, and contemplated her curiously, as if she had been something to wonder at, like the only living gorilla. She was asked to three large dinners, at which she felt herself less than nobody—though she wore laces and jewels enough for a dowager of ancient lineage. Bella, clever as she was, found that these people’s thoughts were not her thoughts, nor their ways her ways—and that all the distance between the east and west was not wider than the gulf between her and the county families. But this was a surmountable difficulty, she told herself. She was quick at learning languages, and would learn the jargon of the county families as easily as she had learned Italian. These scraps of social slang, these continual allusions to people she did not know, and pleasures she had never shared, could hardly be so difficult as Dante.