I was silent. Mr. Brandon was always more queer than other people.
“Is it in keeping with the Pells, this upstart grandeur and profusion? Come, Johnny Ludlow, you’ve some sense in your head: answer me. They have both risen from nothing, Johnny. When he began life, Pell’s ambition was to rise to a competency; an el dorado of three or four hundred a year: and that only when he had worked for it. I have seen her take in the milk for their tea from the milkman at the door; when they kept one servant to do everything. Pell rose by degrees and grew rich; so much the more credit due to his perseverance and his business talents——”
“And would you not have them spend their riches, Mr. Brandon?”
“Spend their riches!—of course I would, in a proper way. Don’t you interrupt your elders, Johnny Ludlow. Where would be the use of a man’s getting money unless he spent some of it. But not in this way; not in the lavish and absurd and sinful profusion that they have indulged in of late years. Is it seemly, or right, or decent, the way they live in? The sons apeing the manners and company of their betters, of young fellows who are born to the peerage and their thousands a year? The mother holding her head in the air as if she wore an iron collar: the daughters with their carriages and their harps and their German governesses, and their costly furbelows that are a scandal on common sense? The world has run mad after these Pells of late years: but I know this much—I have been ashamed only to look on at the Pells’ unseemly folly.”
At that moment Martha Jane Pell—in the toilette that Bill Whitney said must have cost “millions”—went looming by, flirting with Captain Connaught. Mr. Brandon looked after them with his little eyes.
“They are too fine for their station, Johnny. They were not born to this kind of thing; were not reared to it; have only plunged into it of recent years, and it does not sit well upon them. One can only think of upstarts all the time. The Pells might have lived as gentlepeople; ay, and married their children to gentlemen and gentlewomen had they pleased: but, to launch out in this unseemly way, has been a just humiliation to themselves, and has rendered them a poor, pitiful laughing-stock in the eyes of all right-minded people. It’s nothing less than a burlesque on all the proprieties of life. And it may be that we have not seen the end of it, Johnny.”
“Well, sir, they can hardly be grander than——”
“Say more assuming, lad.”
“I suppose I meant that, Mr. Brandon. Perhaps you think they’ll be for taking the Marquis’s place, Ragley, next, if it should come into the market. Or Eastnor Castle: or——”
“I did not mean exactly in that way, Johnny,” he interrupted again, a queer look on his thin lips as he got up.