“Oh, Bessie! you are delightful, and so pretty!”
“I wish I were not pretty, flatterer,” she said. “I should like to be as ugly as Joan Harcourt, and as good. It must be nice to honour one’s parents, let them be as disagreeable as they will, and to love one’s neighbour, even though she keep a parrot, and lets her girls hammer at a piano placed against the party-wall, and is altogether as great a nuisance as Mrs. Riccarde, who lives next door to us. Oh, Alick, how lovely and peaceful the country looks in the moonlight! Is not that the house at Kemms Park I see, shining white among the trees? What a delicious place! Do you know Lord Kemms’ family name?”
“Baldwin,” he replied.
“Baldwin!” repeated Miss Bessie, and there was just a shade of disappointment in her voice. “Is he a good-looking man, Alick? I wish I had been with you yesterday in the Croft when he passed. That is the only taste which I have inherited from my mother; I do dearly love a lord.”
“Bessie!” exclaimed Alick.
“It is a fact,” she persisted; “I do not in the least believe they are made of the same flesh and blood as the commonalty. I delight in men who have had ancestors; that is one reason why I like all of you, because on one side of the house, at least, you come of good people.”
“I am not ashamed of my mother’s family,” answered the lad, a little hastily.
“No, but you are not proud of it; Maddox Cuthbert, alderman, no doubt, was a most charming-old institution, and highly respected in the City but still, that is not like being in the peerage, is it, Alick, or amongst the country gentry?”
“I do not think it matters much what one is, if one have no money,” he replied. “Did you not yourself say at supper, riches make the man?”
“If there is one thing I object to more than another,” interrupted Bessie, “it is to have my own conversational sins brought up as witnesses against me. I was only jesting about lords, Alick. Don’t I know the ancestors of Lord Kemms were something or other in the city, not nearly so respectable as our grandfather? But, seriously, I should like to see his lordship. I have a curiosity about him; was he alone, or had he a groom?”