"Don't you think she is perfectly charming?" (Charming was the word she had found for Bessie Falkner.) "So natural and amusing! She's very Western—she can't have seen much of life—but she isn't a bit ordinary."
"Yes, I like her," Lane replied unenthusiastically, "and he seems original. I shouldn't wonder if he were clever in his profession; he told me a lot about Freke's mines."
What he had learned about the Pleasant Valley mines was the chief thing in the evening to Lane. He did not understand why Isabelle seemed so much more eager to know these people—these Darnells and Falkners—than the Frasers and the Adamses. She had made fun of the solemn dinner that the Frasers had given to introduce them into Torso "society."
"I wonder how they can live on that salary," Isabelle remarked. "One hundred and fifty a month!"
"He must make something outside."
* * * * *
After the Lanes had gone, Bessie Falkner prepared yawningly for bed, leaving her husband to shut up the house. Her weekly excitement of entertaining people over, she always felt let down, like a poet after the stir of creation. It was useless to go over the affair with Rob, as he was merely bored. But she spent hours thinking what the women said and how they looked and deciding whom she could have the next time. On her way to bed she went into the nursery where her two little girls were asleep in their cots beside the nurse, and finding a window open woke the nurse to reprove her for her carelessness. In the hall she met her husband bringing up the silver.
"Emma is so thoughtless," she complained. "I shall have to let her go if I can find another servant in this town."
Her husband listened negligently. The Falkners were perpetually changing their two servants, or were getting on without them.
"Mrs. Lane's maids all wear caps," Mrs. Falkner had observed frequently to her husband.