‘I thought you would have gone on teaching the girls, little woman,’ he said, with a chap-fallen air.
‘My dear Mr. Piper, what time should I have for society, or for you, if I did that? Quite impossible. Besides, the girls will be a great deal better at a first-rate school. They are too high-spirited to obey me, and now I am their mamma they would laugh at my attempts to teach them.’
Mr. Piper sighed and submitted. The boys went to school, as a matter of course. He had no objection to that. But he had hoped that his daughters would stay at home, and cheer his breakfast-table with their chubby common-place faces and small second-hand jokes, and thump their pianoforte duets of an evening for his delectation.
One evil which Mr. Piper had feared in taking Bella for his wife had not befallen him. He had fancied that the Park would be overrun with Scratchells, that Bella, as an affectionate member of a large family, would want to make his house a free warren for her father and mother, brothers and sisters.
But this apprehension of Mr. Piper’s was in no manner realized. Bella sent her family ceremonious invitations to her second best parties, and made a duty call upon her mother after church every Sunday, a time at which Mrs. Scratchell was less distracted by thoughts about the kettle or the kitchen generally than at other periods of her existence; for the Scratchells always had a cold dinner on the Sabbath, not so much from piety as from a conviction of Mrs. Scratchell’s that cold meat went further than hot.
This kind of intercourse was not what the Scratchells—especially Clementina and Flora—had expected; but they were fain to be thankful for the favours they received, and never carried their murmurs further than the sacred home circle, where, sitting round the winter fire, they discoursed at their ease upon Bella’s worldliness and want of natural feeling.
‘I was so glad when Lady Jane refused to go to her dinner party,’ said Clementina. ‘We weren’t asked to that party. Oh no. We were not good enough to meet Lady Jane—nor the Timperleys either. And Lady Jane wrote and told Bella that she only went out to dine with old friends. Wasn’t that splendid?’
‘Did Bella tell you?’ asked Mr. Scratchell.
‘Catch her! She’s too proud to tell me she’s been snubbed. Lady Jane told Mrs. Dulcimer, and Mrs. Dulcimer told me, and I’ve no doubt everybody in the village knows all about it by this time.’
‘No doubt,’ sighed Mrs. Scratchell, in her doleful way. ‘It was a pity Bella put herself so forward.’