he woman
that owned him," and had, as she thought, been on the whole able to
hold her own pretty well against her aspiring neighbour. Now, however,
she found herself distinctly put into a separate and inferior class.
Mrs. Lookaloft was asked into the Ullathorne drawing-room merely
because she called her house Rosebank and had talked over her husband
into buying pianos and silk dresses instead of putting his money by to
stock farms for his sons.

Mrs. Greenacre, much as she reverenced Miss Thorne, and highly as she
respected her husband's landlord, could not but look on this as an act
of injustice done to her and hers. Hitherto the Lookalofts had never
been recognized as being of a different class from the Greenacres.
Their pretensions were all self-pretensions, their finery was all
paid for by themselves and not granted to them by others. The local
sovereigns of the vicinity, the district fountains of honour, had
hitherto conferred on them the stamp of no rank. Hitherto their
crinoline petticoats, late hours, and mincing gait had been a fair
subject of Mrs. Greenacre's raillery, and this raillery had been a
safety-valve for her envy. Now, however, and from henceforward, the
case would be very different. Now the Lookalofts would boast that their
aspirations had been sanctioned by the gentry of the country; now they
would declare with some show of truth that their claims to peculiar
consideration had been recognized. They had sat as equal guests in the
presence of bishops and baronets; they had been curtseyed to by Miss
Thorne on her own drawing-room carpet; they were about to sit down to
table in company with a live countess! Bab Lookaloft, as she had always
been called by the young Greenacres in the days of their juvenile
equality, might possibly sit next to the Honourable George, and that
wretched Gussy might be permitted to hand a custard to the Lady
Margaretta De Courcy.

The fruition of those honours, or such of them as fell to the lot of
the envied family, was not such as should have caused much envy. The
attention paid to the Lookalofts by the De Courcys was very limited,
and the amount of entertainment which they received from the bishop's
society was hardly in itself a recompense for the dull monotony of
their day. But of what they endured Mrs. Greenacre took no account;
she thought only of what she considered they must enjoy, and of the
dreadfully exalted tone of living which would be manifested by the
Roseb