“Then we can go out of doors and sleep à la belle étoile.”
“And the rural constable will pass by with his lanthorn, and wake us up, and run us in! Oh, my dear Ronald, you don’t know what it is to want a sovereign every moment. You’re unmarried, and you shoot with a keeper’s gun, and you yacht in an old wooden tub, and you lounge about all over the world with your places shut up, and your town-house let; what can you tell, what can you dream, of the straits Cocky and I are put to every single minute of our lives?”
“Because you won’t pull up and lead sensible lives,” said Hurstmanceaux. “You must always be in the swim, always at the most ruinously expensive places. Can’t you exist without tearing over Europe and bits of Africa every year? Did our forefathers want Cairene winters? Couldn’t they fish and shoot, and dance and flirt, without Norway and the Riviera? Wasn’t their own county town enough for them? Weren’t their lungs capable of breathing without Biskra? Weren’t they quite as good sportsmen as we are with only their fowling-pieces? Quite as fine ladies as you are, though they saw to their still-rooms?”
“Their women look very nice in the Romneys and Reynolds,” said Mouse. “But you might as well ask why we don’t go from Derby to Bath in a coach-and-six. Autre temps autre moeurs. There is nothing else to be said. Would you yourself use your grandfather’s gun? Why should I see to my still-room?
“I do wish,” she continued, “that you would talk about what you understand. I will send you the bill for the children’s boots and shoes, just to show you what it costs one merely to have them properly shod.”
“Poor little souls!” said Hurstmanceaux, with his smile which people called cynical. “I don’t think they are the heaviest of your expenses. I believe you could live with the whole lot of them in a cottage at Broadstairs or Herne Bay all the year round for about what your hunting mares cost you in one season.”
“Don’t be an ass, Ronald,” said his sister crossly; “what is the use of talking of things that nobody can do, any more than they can wear their fustian clothes or wooden shoes? You will know what I mean some day when you’re married. We are worse off than the match-sellers, than the crossing-sweepers. They can do as they like, but we can’t.”
“Life isn’t all skittles and swipes,” observed Hurstmanceaux. “You always seem to think it is.”
But she, disregarding him, went on in her wrath:
“It is a thousand times worse to be poor in our world than to be beggars on the high road. If they keep in with the police they’re all right, but our police are all round us every minute of our lives, spying to see if we have a man less in the anterooms, a hoof less in the stables, if we have the same gown on, or the same houses open; if we’ve given up any club, any habit, any moors, any shooting; if the prince talks as much to us as usual, or the princess asks us to drive with her; if we go away for the winter to shut up a place, or make lungs an excuse for getting away to avoid Scotland; they are eternally staring, commenting, annotating, whispering over all we do; we can never get away from them; and we daren’t retrench a halfpenny’s worth, because if we did, the tradespeople would think we were ruined and all the pack would be down on us.”