Geoffrey looked pained.
“I know, I know,” he said, hastily. “It is horrible for you. Perfectly unbearable. You don’t think I don’t know it, and feel it. Heaven knows how bitterly! I was more than half inclined to tell the old fellow his wife might keep her precious visits to herself; only I dared not risk offending him. Condescension, indeed! Vulgar wretches!—as if we wanted them to come prying about us, the purse-proud——”
Marion jumped up and put her hand on his mouth.
“Hush, Geoffrey. It is very wicked of me to put such notions into your head. I had no business to talk about hating being patronised. It is very silly, and low, and mean of me. Of course they intend to be kind, and of course I should be civil to Mrs. Baxter, if she is as ugly as the queen of the cannibal islands. So don’t say any more about her. I suppose she is elderly, and fat. These dread-fully prosperous people are always fat. They can’t help it, I suppose.”
“I don’t know, I’m sure,” said Geoffrey, listlessly. “Oh yes, by-the-by, I remember some one at the office saying Mrs. Baxter was much younger than her husband. An heiress too, I believe. That’s always the way.”
“He looked weary and dispirited, and Marion felt remorseful for having caused it. So she played to him (Mrs. Appleby’s front room actually boasted a piano, such as it was) soft, simple airs—for he was no connoisseur in music—till he went to sleep on the hard, uncomfortable little sofa of the regulation lodging-house pattern, the designers of which seem to be under the impression that human beings can at pleasure unhook their legs and fasten them on again sideways. In which posture only could anything like comfortable repose be possible for the wretched victims of upholstery torture.
Mrs. Baxter was as good as her word, or rather as Mr. Baxter’s.
Two days later, a chariot, of the imposing appearance and dimensions suited for the conveyance of a Millington millionairess, drawn by two prancing, rocking-horsey greys, comfortably conscious of their own amazingly good condition and unimpeachable harness, drew up at Mrs. Appleby’s modest door. A gorgeous footman having made the enquiry necessary to preclude the possibility of his mistress’s getting in and out of her equipage for nothing, and having reported to the lady that Mrs. Baldwin was at home, or “hin,” as Mrs. Appleby’s factotum expressed it, the door of the chariot opened, and thence emerged one of the very smallest women Marion had ever seen.
From where she sat, all that passed in front of the house was visible to Mrs. Baldwin, and she observed with considerable amusement the immense pomposity of the whole affair, resulting in the appearance of the almost absurdly minute person of Mrs. Baxter.
But if the body was small, the mind evidently felt itself great. No five-feet-eight or nine woman ever sailed into a room with half the awe-compelling dignity, the incomparable “air de duchesse” of little Mrs. Baxter. It had done her good service in her day, this magnificent mien of hers; it (and the fact of her being “poor dear papa’s only child”) had won her the adoring homage of various young Millingtonians more inclined to spend than to earn, had finally achieved the conquest of old Baxter himself, and now in these latter days had constituted her the indisputable queen of Millington society.