Mr. Piper looked on and admired, while his young wife wasted his money, laughed at his friends, and made light of his opinions; but he was not altogether satisfied or easy in his mind. It would not be always so, he thought. There would come a day! The Duchess was carrying things with a high hand. It was perhaps just as well to let her have her fling. She was so unaccustomed to the command of money, poor little woman, that she might be forgiven for spending it somewhat recklessly. And, after all, this increased expenditure was pleasanter than poor Moggie’s carefulness and perpetual lamentations about butcher’s bills and pounds of butter. Mr. Piper liked his new butler, and was even in his heart of hearts not displeased with the powdered footman or the top-booted groom, though he affected to despise those follies. He felt himself on a level with the Timperleys in their scarlet Tudor mansion, with its jutting windows and leaden lattices, its deep porch and iron-studded door, its gilded vane and many gables, at once intensely old and dazzlingly new. He was living as became his wealth and social status, living like the Porkmans and the Wigzells, and the rest of his purse-proud acquaintance. The first Mrs. Piper had hung upon him like a log on a hobbled donkey, and had deprived him of all freedom, with her ever-lasting economical scruples. He had been afraid to give a dinner party, knowing that for a month after there would be ceaseless wailings about the expense of the feast.
‘Piper, have you any idea what grouse were when you asked Mr. Timperley to dinner last August?’ Mrs. Piper would demand.
‘I know the brace we had were uncommonly tough, and precious badly cooked,’ Mr. Piper would retort.
‘They were twelve shillings a brace, Piper. Here’s the poulterer’s bill to prove it to you. I call it sinful to eat game at such a price. You know you ordered them, Piper. I should have inquired what they were to cost—but you never do.’
‘I wanted to give Timperley a decent dinner,’ Mr. Piper would reply. ‘Hang it, Moggie! when I go to Timperley’s he feeds me on the fat of the land. Besides, we can afford it.’
‘Nobody can afford wanton extravagance,’ Mrs. Piper would groan; and this kind of conversation would occur daily.
Thus it was a new thing to Mr. Piper to have his domestic life administered with liberal-handed luxury, to hear no complaints about the misconduct of servants or the price of provisions, not to be awakened abruptly from his after-dinner nap to be told that bread had gone up a halfpenny, or that Scrogfield was charging thirteen-pence for fillet of veal.
‘Upon my word, little woman,’ he exclaimed one day, delighted with his wife’s cleverness, ‘you have made the house a paradise.’
It was still more a paradise after Christmas, for the second Mrs. Piper, having found out that her step-daughters were sadly in want of dancing and calisthenics, which they could not be taught properly at home, and would be much benefited by being transplanted to Miss Turk’s boarding school, on the outskirts of Great Yafford, the school at which Mrs. Dulcimer and all the best people in the neighbourhood had been educated, under the aunts and predecessors of the reigning Miss Turk.
Mr. Piper was rather disappointed, just at first, by this idea of Bella’s. He had hoped to have his daughters always at home. They were troublesome, rude, and noisy, but still Mr. Piper loved them, as the gladiator loved his young barbarians.