'My dear,' said Mrs. Dallas, 'I am astonished to hear you speak so. Are not you interested?'
'Yes ma'am; but why should I be? For really, often the farmer's family is the more respectable of the two.'
'Are you such a republican, Betty? I did not know it.'
'There is a reason, though,' said Pitt, repressing a smile, 'which even a republican may allow. The contrast here is greater. The glory and pomp of earthly power is here brought into sharp contact with the nothingness of it, So much yesterday,—so little to-day. Those uplifted hands in prayer are exceedingly touching, when one remembers that all their mightiness has come down to that!'
'It is not every fool that thinks so,' remarked Mr. Dallas ambiguously.
'No,' said Betty, with a sudden impulse of championship; 'fools do not think at all.'
'Here is a tablet to Lady Knollys,' said Pitt, moving on. 'She was a niece of Anne Boleyn, and waited upon her to the scaffold.'
'But that is only a tablet,' said Mrs. Dallas. 'Who is this, Pitt?' She was standing before an effigy that bore a coronet; Betty beside her.
'That is the Duchess of Suffolk; the mother of Lady Jane Grey.'
'I see,' said Betty, 'that the Abbey is the complement of the Tower. Her daughter and her husband lie there, under the pavement of the chapel. How comes she to be here?'