"He has boiled jam into sweetness for the whole civilised world," said the most influential and awful of Lord Castleclare's seven sisters, a Dowager-Duchess who was Lady-in-Waiting, and exhaled the choicest essence of the Middle Victorian era. She still adhered to the mushroom-shaped straw hats of her youth, trimmed with black velvet rosettes, in the centre of each of which reposed a cut jet button. She went always voluminously clad in black or shot-silk gowns, their skirts so swelled out by a multiplicity of starched cambric petticoats, adorned with tambour-work, that she was credited with the existence of a crinoline. She had, in marrying her now defunct Scots Duke, embraced Presbyterianism, and though her brother believed her, as far as the next world was concerned, to be lost beyond redemption, he entertained for her judgment in the matters of this planet a great esteem.
"He has boiled jam enough to spread over the surface of the civilised globe, and now proposes to hive its concentrated extract for the benefit of our dearest girl, in the shape of a settlement that a Princess of the Blood might envy. I call the whole thing pretty," pronounced the Dowager, "almost romantic, or it might be made to sound so if a person of superior intelligence and tact would undertake to plead for the young man. His terrible title has quite escaped me. Lord Plumbanks? Thank you! It might have been Strawberrybeds, and that would have increased our difficulty. No time should be lost. Therefore, as you, dear Castleclare, with your wife and the boy, who, I am gratified to hear, has cut another, are going to Rome for Holy Week, perhaps you would wish me in your absence to break the ice with Bridget-Mary?"
Lord Castleclare's long, solemn face and arched, lugubrious eyebrows bore no little resemblance to the well-known portrait of the conscientious but unlucky Stuart in whose service his ancestor had shed blood and money, receiving in lieu of both, a great many Royal promises, the Eastern carpet that had belonged to the monarch's Irish oratory, and the fine sard intaglio, brilliant-set, and representing a Calvary, that loyal servant's descendant wore upon his thin ivory middle finger. He twiddled the ring nervously as he said:
"She has gone into Lenten Retreat at a Convent in Kensington. I—arah!—I do not think it would be advisable to disturb salutary and seasonable meditations with—arah!—worldly matters at this present moment."
"Fiddle-faddle!" said the Dowager-Duchess sharply.
Lord Castleclare lifted his melancholy arched eyebrows.
"'Fiddle-faddle,' my dear Constantia?"
"You have the expression!" said she. "Young women of Bridget-Mary's age and temperament will think of marriage in convents as much as outside them. Further, I dread delay, entertaining as I do the very certain conviction that this weak-minded man who has thrown your daughter over will be back, begging Bridget-Mary to forgive him and reinstate him in the possession of her affections before another two months are over our heads. That little cat-eyed, squirrel-haired woman he has run away with, and against whom I have warned our poor dear girl times out of number"—she really believed this—"is the sort of pussy, purring creature to make a man feel her claws, once she has got him. Therefore, although my family may not thank me for it, I shall continue to repeat, 'No time is to be lost!' Still, in deference to your religious prejudices, and although I never heard that the Catholic Church prohibited jam as an article of Lenten diet, we will defer from offering Bridget-Mary the pot until Easter."