Aunt Letitia turned suddenly and rapped her nephew’s shoulder with her fan.
“Richard,” she said, with some asperity, “is it customary to sit between a lady and the fire?”
Jeffray apologized and shifted his chair. Dr. Sugg was engaged in shuffling the cards; the dowager’s black eyes were busy scanning her nephew’s person with the critical keenness of a woman of the world.
“Richard, where did you get that coat?” she asked.
“At Lewes, aunt.”
“Pooh! the rascal has made it like a sack. You must have a smart tailor, boy. I cannot allow you to be disgraced by your clothes.”
Dr. Sugg, who was glancing over his cards, cast a pathetic look at Richard, and groaned over his inveterate bad luck. Aunt Letitia’s eyes glistened; her rouged and scraggy face was radiant with miserly good humor.
“My dear Richard,” she said, benignantly, “I must really take you to The Wells with me, and introduce you into respectable society. You must learn elegance, dignity, address. These virtues are as necessary to a young man of good family as a good tailor or a smart hatter. You must have your hair dressed properly; I will instruct Gladden myself in the latest fashion. Bucolic melancholy does not pass for fine breeding in elegant circles.”
Jeffray smiled somewhat cynically at his aunt as he watched her clutching at poor Sugg’s shillings. He was heartily tired of his elderly relative’s imperial patronage. She condescended to accept his hospitality, and improved the occasion by pestering him with her worldly superficialities, abusing his “bookishness” and amending his manners. The nephew looked forward to his aunt’s departure with a sincerity that was ingenuous and enthusiastic. The Lady Letitia was still, however, bent upon economy. Though the country bored her excessively, she was saving money at her nephew’s expense, and his hospitality would enable her to go to Tunbridge Wells in the spring unencumbered by debt.
Dr. Suggs departed with an empty purse after supper, to trudge home to the parsonage through the drifting snow. The Lady Letitia established herself in a fauteuil beside the fire in the damask drawing-room, with Tom Jones on her knee and a glass of steaming rum at her elbow. Jeffray had taken refuge in the library, the only room in the house that Aunt Letitia suffered him to possess in peace. The dowager bore herself as though she were the mistress of Rodenham Priory, walked the linen-room and kitchen, rated the servants, and even bearded old Peter Gladden, the butler, in his den.