‘I suppose she will be invited here soon. It would be funny if she were here with Lady Maria, would it not?’
‘Mamma says it is all Uncle Fullarton’s doing, because he is so much mixed up with that dreadful Lady Eliza. Ah-a-a-a-ah!’
‘I know; she has always thought that very undesirable, she says. I wonder how she has consented to write; I am sure she would never have done it for anyone but Crauford.’
‘I wonder what it is like to have a sister-in-law?’ said Agneta, pausing in her shrieks.
‘It would depend very much what kind of person she is,’ replied her sister, with some show of sense.
‘Yes, but should we be allowed to go anywhere with her? Perhaps she would take us out,’ said Agneta.
Lady Fordyce was one of those mothers who find it unnecessary to take their daughters into society, and yet confidently expect them to marry well. Though Agneta, the youngest, was twenty-five, and Mary was past thirty, Lady Maria Milwright was the only young person who had ever stayed in the house. A couple of stiff parties were given every year, and, when there was a county ball, the Misses Fordyce were duly driven to it, each in a new dress made for the occasion, to stand one on either side of their mother’s chair during the greater part of the evening. Had anyone suggested to Lady Fordyce that Mary was an old maid and that Agneta would soon become one, she would have been immoderately angry. ‘When my daughters are married I shall give up the world altogether,’ she would sometimes say; and her hearer would laugh in his sleeve; first, at the thought of any connection between Lady Fordyce and the world, and secondly, at the thought of any connection between the Misses Fordyce and matrimony. Had they been houris of Paradise their chances would have been small, and unfortunately, they were rather plain.
‘I should think Crauford will soon come back,’ continued Agneta, as she put away her music. ‘I shall ask him all sorts of questions.’
To do Fordyce justice, he was a kind brother in an ordinary way, and had often stood between his sisters and the maternal displeasure when times were precarious. He did not consider them of much importance, save as members of his own family, but he would throw them small benefits now and again with the tolerant indulgence he might have shown in throwing a morsel to a pet animal.
‘He has never said whether she is pretty,’ observed Mary reflectively. ‘He always calls her “ladylike,” and I don’t think mamma believes him; but, after all, she may be, Agneta.’