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His idea was, you see, that if his father gave you something he and James would have to be bought off. So they were in the end, but they'd have had more if he'd played his hand better." Winn laughed. "Jolly to be home again," he remarked. "Dinner as usual?" "Yes," said Lady Staines, "and don't forget one of the footmen's a Plymouth Brother and mustn't be shocked.
But she also consumed her bread and butter. 'That poor maid of mine is an instance of a woman able to do things against the grain, she said. 'Danvers is a foster-child of luxury. She loves it; great houses, plentiful meals, and the crowd of twinkling footmen's calves. Yet you see her here in a desolate house, consenting to cold, and I know not what, terrors of ghosts! poor soul.
Madame de Choisy cried out, upon which M. de Turenne threw himself out of the coach, and I, thinking we were beset by highwaymen, leaped out on the other side, took one of the footmen's hangers, drew it, and went to the other aide to join M. de Turenne, whom I found with his eyes fixed on something, but what I could not see.
Then his eyes falling on the carriage which was about to turn the corner of the field, and on the imperial of which the footmen's torches lighted up a golden coronet, with eight strawberry leaves, he exclaimed, "She is more. She is a duchess." The carriage disappeared: The rumbling of its wheels died away in the distance.
"Couldn't think of asking you, Ma'am," he added, generously. This delicacy made his aunt laugh the more. "Go and settle the bill, Bowls," she said, with a wave of her hand, "and bring it to me." Poor lady, she did not know what she had done! "There there's a little dawg," said James, looking frightfully guilty. "I'd best go for him. He bites footmen's calves."
But in the incessant going about in London, their names were called out together so often that his ear grew sensitive and sore to the touch of the footmen's reverberations. The meaning differentiation which the voices of the servants insisted upon, seemed inevitably reflected in the glance and manner of their mistresses.
Officers no longer went into society with uniform and sword. Bishops laid aside their wigs; dignified clergy discarded the cassock. Coloured coats, silk stockings, lace ruffles, and hair-powder survived only in the footmen's liveries. The lines of demarcation between the peerage and the untitled classes were partially obliterated.
Folks did say the rabbit was the old Squire's soul, an' that he'd turned black inside the young Squire's hat. Very stiff behaviour. "He've had his own way too much; that's what it is. When he was pricked for sheriff, he hired a ramshackle po'shay, painted a mule 'pon the panel, an' stuffed the footmen's stockings with bran till it looked a case of dropsy.
If the fashionable world be truly represented, as it is not, in the swarms of so-called fashionable novels, gleaned from the sloppy conversation of footmen's ordinaries, or the retail tittle-tattle of lady's-maids in waiting at the registry-offices, how little is it to the credit of the mass of the reading public that they peruse such stuff; or would it be perused at all, but for that vulgar love, so prevalent about town, of imitation of the Lady Fannys and Lady Mary Dollymops, their nonchalance, their insipidity, their studied ease, and their affectation of being unaffected?
But, strange to say, the auditory, insensible to the delight with which the public would view the splendid architectural improvements with taste too grovelling to appreciate the glories of plate-glass shop-fronts and brass scroll work too selfish to rejoice, for its own sake, in the beauty of arabesques and chandeliers, which, though they never might behold, the astonished public would with souls too niggardly to leap for joy at the thought that gents would henceforth buy the registered guanaco vest, and the patent elastic omni-seasonum paletot half-a-crown cheaper than ever or that needy noblemen would pay three-pound-ten instead of five pounds for their footmen's liveries received the news, clod-hearted as they were, in sullen silence, and actually, when they got into the street, broke out into murmurs, perhaps into execrations.
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