"I daresay. It is generally the case with millionaires. They give four hundred a year to a cook, and dine upon a mutton-chop or a boiled chicken. But really Mr. Fairfax and Geraldine will be almost poor at first; only my sister has fortunately no taste for display, and George must have sown all his wild oats by this time. I expect them to be a model couple, they are so thoroughly attached to each other."
Clarissa opened one of her volumes and bent over it at this juncture. Was this really true? Did Lady Laura believe what she said? Was that problem which she had been perpetually trying to solve lately so very simple, after all, and only a perplexity to her own weak powers of reason? Lady Laura must be the best judge, of course, and she was surely too warm-hearted a woman to take a conventional view of things, or to rejoice in a mere marriage of convenience. No, it must be true. They really did love each other, these two, and that utter absence of all those small signs and tokens of attachment which Clarissa had expected to see was only a characteristic of good taste. What she had taken for coldness was merely a natural reserve, which at once proved their superior breeding and rebuked her own vulgar curiosity.
From the question of the coming marriage, Lady Laura flew to the lighter subject of the ball.
"I hope Miss Granger has brought a ball-dress; I told her all about our ball in my last note."
"I believe she has provided herself for the occasion," replied Mr. Granger. "I know there was an extra trunk, to which I objected when my people were packing the luggage. Sophia is not usually extravagant in the matter of dress. She has a fair allowance, of course, and liberty to exceed it on occasion; but I believe she spends more upon her school-children and pensioners in the village than on her toilet."
"Your ideas on the subject of costume are not quite so wide as Mr. Brummel's, I suppose," said my lady. "Do you remember his reply, when an anxious mother asked him what she ought to allow her son for dress?"
Mr. Granger did not spoil my lady's delight in telling an anecdote by remembering; and he was a man who would have conscientiously declared his familiarity with the story, had he known it.
"'It might be done on eight hundred a year, madam,' replied Brummel, 'with the strictest economy.'"
Mr. Granger gave a single-knock kind of laugh.
"Curious fellow, that Brummel," he said. "I remember seeing him at Caen, when I was travelling as a young man."