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Updated: May 1, 2025
At the same time, the spectator must needs admit there was something else in Lady Dunstable's talk than mere intelligence or mere mannishness. There was undoubtedly something of "the good fellow," and, through all her hard hitting, a curious absence in conversation of the personal egotism she was quite ready to show in all the trifles of life.
Doris could not help wishing to know. "She took a fancy to ask a girl near here the daughter of a clergyman, a great friend of Lord Dunstable's, to come over for the Sunday. Lord Dunstable had talked of the girl, and Rachel's always on the look-out for cleverness; she hunts it like a hound!
Just take out my bag, and tell the footman to put it in your room. That will do for the present. I shall sit down here and wait for Lady Dunstable. I'm pretty tired." The thought of what the magnificent gentleman presiding over Lady Dunstable's hall would say to the unexpected irruption of Mrs. Meadows, and Mrs. Meadows's bag, upon the "fortified post" he controlled, was simply beyond expressing.
When the rumour of his liaison with Miss Dunstable reached her ears, when she heard of Miss Dunstable's fortune, she had wept, wept outright, in her chamber wept, as she said to herself, to think that he should be so mercenary; but she had wept, as she should have said to herself, at finding that he was so faithless.
She was the more eager in doing this, because she imagined Frank had done what he could to obey her first precepts. He had not turned up his nose at Miss Dunstable's curls, nor found fault with her loud voice: he had not objected to her as ugly, nor even shown any dislike to her age.
The countess had claimed her prey, in order that she might carry him off to Miss Dunstable's golden embrace. The prey, not yet old enough and wise enough to connect the worship of Plutus with that of Venus, had made sundry futile feints and dodges in the vain hope of escape. Then the anxious mother had enforced the de Courcy behests with all a mother's authority.
It was the matter of a new dress which was now indeed running in her mind. She took up Lady Dunstable's letter, and read it pensively through again. "You can accept for yourself, Arthur, of course," she said, looking up. "But I can't possibly go." Meadows protested loudly. "You have no excuse at all!" he declared hotly. "Lady Dunstable has given us a month's notice. You can't get out of it.
As it was, Lady Dunstable's exacting ways, her swoop, straight and fierce, on the social morsel she desired, like that of an eagle on the sheepfold, had made her, in Doris's sore consciousness, the representative of thousands more; all greedy, able, domineering, inevitably getting what they wanted, and more than they deserved; against whom the starved and virtuous intellectuals of the professional classes were bound to contend to the death.
Dunstable's contributions to the conversation were entirely in the form of nods; whenever Alderman Dunstable praised or blamed she nodded twice or thrice, according to the requirements of his emphasis. And she seemed always to keep one eye on Ann Veronica's dress. Mrs. Everybody seemed greatly concerned about the sincerity of Tolstoy.
No doubt she was at Courcy, and her carriage stopped at the hotel; but neither there nor elsewhere did she make any public exhibition. "They must have mistaken me for Mrs. Proudie," she said, when the rumour reached her ears. But there was, alas! one great element of failure on Miss Dunstable's side of the battle. Mr. Sowerby himself could not be induced to fight it as became a man.
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