“And why not, madam?” says Fanshawe. “It is, it seems, all en tout bien, tout honneur.”
“I don’t understand gibberish, sir, but girls should be circumspec.”
Fanshawe gazes at her through his eyeglass.
“Your mother-in-law to be?” he murmurs.
Mrs. Brown, not hearing, goes on in a rather shrill tone: “I don’t mean my daughter to walk along with you, sir, till she’s a right to take your arm afore everybody.”
Bertram shudders.
Fanshawe lifts his hat to Mrs. Brown approvingly.
“These sentiments, madam, do you the highest honour. The quality, as you would call them, are not so severe. Their young ladies sit out on the staircases, and flirt in corners with their young men, and meet them in these sylvan groves with a groom as chaperon, without any certainty that matrimony will ever follow. But then the demi-vierge is probably confined to the Upper Ten.”
“I don’t know about the ways o’ the gentry, sir,” says Mrs. Brown; “in our street we’re respectable though we are back o’ Portman Square.”
“Madam! Juvenal himself never implied anything so crushing! Bertram, I ask again, is this good lady about to be your mother-in-law?”