'What of that?'
'Mr. Baynes was a manufacturer.'
'So is Philip.'
'Well, yes; for his sins. But then he is allied to us who have dropped an n, and capitalized a Q, and adopted and inserted a hyphen. Mr. Baynes was not in the faintest degree related to us. Philip has behaved with gross indecency. A bagman's daughter within five months of his uncle's death! Monstrous. If she had been his social equal we could have waived the month—but, a bagman's daughter! I feel as if allied to blackbeetles.'
'Her father was about to be taken into partnership when he died,' argued the captain.
'If he had been a partner, that would have been another matter, and I should not have been so pained and mortified; but he was not, and a man takes his position by the place he occupied when he died, not by that which he might have occupied had he lived. Why, if Sidebottom had lived and been elected Mayor of Northingham in the year of the Prince's visit he might have been knighted, but that does not make me Lady Sidebottom.'
'You call him a bagman,' said Captain Lambert. 'But I should say he was a commercial traveller.'
'And how does that mend matters? Do seven syllables make a difference? A dress-improver is no other than a bustle, and an influenza than a cold in the head.'
'All I know is,' said the captain, 'that his daughters are deuced pretty girls, and as good a pair of ladies as you will meet anywhere. I've known some of your grand ladies say awfully stupid things, and I can't imagine Janet doing that; and some do rather mean things, and Salome could not by any chance do what was unkind or ungenerous. I've a deuce of a mind to propose to Janet, as I have been chiselled out of my one hundred and fifty.'
'Chiselled out!'