ng motion of
Langham's head and eyes toward the Romney portrait of Mr. Wendover's
grandmother, and was certain when he stopped afterward to say something
to his companion, that he was commenting on a certain surface likeness
there was between her and the young auburn-haired beauty of the picture.
Hateful! And they would be sent down to dinner together to a certainty.

The other guests were Lady Charlotte Wynnstay, a cousin of the Squire--a
tall, imperious, loud-voiced woman, famous in London society for her
relationships, her audacity, and the salon which in one way or another
she managed to collect round her; her dark, thin, irritable-looking
husband; two neighboring clerics--the first, by name Longstaffe, a
somewhat inferior specimen of the cloth, whom Robert cordially disliked;
and the other, Mr. Bickerton, a gentle Evangelical, one of those men who
help to ease the harshness of a cross-grained world, and to reconcile
the cleverer or more impatient folk in it to the worries of living.

Lady Charlotte was already known by name to the Elsmeres as the aunt
of one of their chief friends of the neighborhood--the wife of a
neighboring squire whose property joined that of Murewell Hall, one Lady
Helen Varley, of whom more presently. Lady Charlotte was the sister of
the Duke of Sedbergh, one of the greatest of Dukes, and the sister also
of Lady Helen's mother, lady Wanless. Lady Wanless had died prematurely,
and her two younger children, Helen and Hugh Flaxman, creatures both of
them of unusually fine and fiery quality, had owed a good deal to
their aunt. There were family alliances between the Sedberghs and
the Wendovers, and Lady Charlotte made a point of keeping up with the
Squire. She adored cynics and people who said piquant things, and it
amused her to make her large tyrannous hand felt by the Squire's timid,
crackbrained, ridiculous little sister.

As to Dr. Meyrick, he was tall and gaunt as Don Quixote. His gray
hair made a ragged fringe round his straight-backed head; he wore an
old-fashioned neck-cloth; his long body had a perpetual stoop, as though
of deference, and his spectacled look of mild attentiveness had nothing
in common with that medical self-assurance with which we are all
nowadays so familiar. Robert noticed presently that when he addressed
Mrs. Darcy he said 'Ma'am,' making no bones at all about it; and his
manner generally was the manner of one to whom class distinctions were
the profoundest reality