‘Why should not they send you champagne?’ she said. ‘They are as rich as Crœsus, though I am sure I don’t know much about him; and you are a lady living by yourself, and can’t be expected to think of all these things.’
‘My dear Lottie,’ said I—and I confess I was angry—‘if you are not content with what I can give you, you need not come to me. The Greshams can stay away if they like. Champagne in the afternoon when you are playing croquet! It is just like those nouveaux riches. They would think it still finer, I have no doubt, if they could drink pearls, like Cleopatra. Champagne!’
‘They must have meant it for Cup, you know,’ said Lottie, a little abashed.
‘I don’t care what they meant it for,’ said I. ‘You shall have cups of tea; and I am very angry and affronted. I wonder how they think we got on before they came!’
And then I sat down and wrote a little note, which I fear was terribly polite, and sent it and the baskets back with John Thomas, while Lottie went and looked at all the pictures as if she had never seen them before, and hummed little airs under her breath. She had taken up these Greshams in the most curious way. Not that she was an unreasonable partisan; she could see their faults like the rest of us, but she was always ready to make excuses for them. ‘They don’t know any better,’ she would say softly when she was driven to the very extremity of her special pleading. And she said this when I had finished my note and was just sending it away.
‘But why don’t they know better?’ said I; ‘they have had the same education as other people. He was at Eton where a boy should learn how to behave himself, even if he does not learn anything else. And she went to one of the fashionable schools—as good a school as any of you ever went to.’
‘We were never at any school at all,’ said Lottie with a little bitterness. ‘We were always much too poor. We have never learned anything, we poor girls; whereas Ada Gresham has learned everything,’ she added with a little laugh.
It was quite true. Poor little Mrs. Gresham was overflowing with accomplishments. There never was such an education as she had received. She had gone to lectures, and studied thorough bass, and knew all about chemistry, and could sympathize with her husband, as the newspapers say, and enter into all his pursuits. How fine it sounds in the newspapers! Though I was angry, I could not but laugh too—a young woman wanted an elaborate education indeed to be fit to be young Gresham’s wife.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘after all, I don’t suppose she means to be impertinent, Lottie, and I like her. I don’t think her education has done her much harm. Nobody could teach her to understand other people’s feelings; and to be rich like that must be a temptation.’
‘I should like to have such a temptation,’ said Lottie, with a sudden sparkle in her eyes. ‘Fancy there are four Greshams, and they are all as rich. The girl is married, you know, to a railway man; and, by the by,’ she went on suddenly after a pause, ‘they tell me one of the brothers is coming here to-day.’