For though the range of his ideas was not so limited, nor their circle so circumscribed, as was the case with those possessed by his wife. Brain work of any kind, even though it be confined to invoices and shipping-orders, and never soar above the usual round of mercantile interests and excitements, having an innate tendency to develop generally the mental faculties and widen their grasp.
The “family dinner” was a very gorgeous affair. Besides Mr. and Mrs. William and the “trollopy Maria Jane,” there were some six or eight of the habitués of the Baxter circle, making in all a company of fourteen or fifteen guests.
Dinner announced, Marion, to her surprise, and the secret chagrin of the observant hostess, found herself selected by Mr. Baxter to occupy the place of honour at his right. Just, however, as she was placing her hand on the old gentleman’s arm, to her amazement a sudden rush (if so undignified a word may be applied to the movements of so stately a lady) was made from the other side of the room by Mrs. Baxter and a tall man, to whom she had the look of acting as a small but energetic tug. The pair pushed their way to the front of the company, and Marion beheld for the first time the unusual spectacle of the hostess preceding her guests to her own dining-room. Mrs. Baldwin’s cheeks, despite her philosophy, flushed.
“Can this,” she said to herself, “be done intentionally to insult me? I don’t mind for myself, but if Geoffrey thinks that little woman is rude to me it will make him so angry, and our coming here will have done more harm than good.”
Somewhat anxiously she glanced up at Mr. Baxter’s face, to see what he thought of this extraordinary procedure on the part of his wife. The worthy gentleman was smiling blandly, and modestly made way for the advancing couples, as one by one they filed out of the room, till at last, his sheep-dog occupation at an end, he and his bewildered charge brought up the rear, and, crossing the tesselated hall, through a double row of Jeamses, took their places at table.
Evidently nothing in what had occurred had in the least astonished him. The whole, therefore, must have been thoroughly “en regle,” according to Millington ideas. “Truly,” thought Mistress Marion to herself, sententiously, as her gaze fell first on the splendour of the table appointments and next on the faces surrounding her, and she began to realize something of the wonders of cottonocracy, the talent and energy which have made it what it is, the extraordinary contrasts and inconsistencies discernible in its social aspects. “Truly,” thought to herself “the wife of one of Mr. Baxter’s clerks,” “ ‘we live and learn and do the wiser grow.’ ” Glancing across the table she caught sight at the other end of Geoffrey’s face, and a smile on it brought a bright expression to her own. He looked cheery and comfortable enough, which it relieved her to see; and in the very bottom of her heart she, though sitting there as “grandly dressed,” as the children say, as any at table, felt not a little glad that for once in a way her poor boy was sure of a really good dinner and as many glasses of excellent wine as his extremely temperate habits would allow him to consume.
For, with all her housewifely care, their living at Mrs. Appleby’s was necessarily of the plainest, and sometimes Marion had sharp misgivings that this, among other things, was beginning to tell on Geoffrey’s health. He professed to dine, or lunch, in Millington, but as often as not his wife suspected that the so-called meal was nothing more substantial than a biscuit; for all their funds passed through her hands, and out of the infinitesimal sum which was all she could persuade him to appropriate to his personal expenses, very few luncheons worthy of the name, it was evident even to her inexperience, could be provided.
One of these sudden misgivings visited her just now, as glancing again in her husband’s direction she observed attentively his face, this time turned from her. Surely the profile was sharper than of yore, the cheek-bone more defined, the hollow round the eye, strangely deeper? A sort of mist came before her sight, and into her mind there flashed one of those commonplace sayings, household aphorisms, to which, till they touch us practically, we pay so little heed. “It is not always the strongest-looking men that stand the most or are the wiriest,” she had heard said a hundred times, without considering the meaning of the words. Now, however, they suddenly started before her, invested with new force and significance, and she was rapidly falling into a painful reverie, when she was recalled to present surroundings by the fat, commonplace voice of her host, remarking to her by way of saying something original, that “he hoped she liked Millington.”
Much in the same words as she had replied to the same observation on the part of Mrs Baxter, Marion answered. “Oh, yes, she liked it very well. Doubtless, in time, she would like it better.”
“When you have made a few more friends here, perhaps,” said the gentleman civilly. “I am sorry my wife was so long of calling on you, but to tell you the truth it was not till lately I was aware my friend Baldwin was married.” (A fib, of course, or at least three-quarters of one.)