spend a night in town on his return, in order that he might accept an
invitation to drink tea with the Furnivals. "We shall be very happy
to see you," Mrs. Furnival had said, backing the proposition which
had come from her daughter without any very great fervour; "but I
fear Mr. Furnival will not be at home. Mr. Furnival very seldom is at
home now." Young Mason did not much care for fervour on the part of
Sophia's mother, and therefore had accepted the invitation, though he
was obliged by so doing to curtail by some hours his sojourn among
the guano stores of Liverpool.

It was the time of year at which few people are at home in London,
being the middle of October; but Mrs. Furnival was a lady of whom at
such periods it was not very easy to dispose. She could have made
herself as happy as a queen even at Margate, if it could have suited
Furnival and Sophia to be happy at Margate with her. But this did not
suit Furnival or Sophia. As regards money, any or almost all other
autumnal resorts were open to her, but she could be contented at
none of them because Mr. Furnival always pleaded that business--law
business or political business--took him elsewhere. Now Mrs. Furnival
was a woman who did not like to be deserted, and who could not, in
the absence of those social joys which Providence had vouchsafed to
her as her own, make herself happy with the society of other women
such as herself. Furnival was her husband, and she wanted him to
carve for her, to sit opposite to her at the breakfast table, to tell
her the news of the day, and to walk to church with her on Sundays.
They had been made one flesh and one bone, for better and worse,
thirty years since; and now in her latter days she could not put up
with disseveration and dislocation.

She had gone down to Brighton in August, soon after the House broke
up, and there found that very handsome apartments had been taken for
her--rooms that would have made glad the heart of many a lawyer's
wife. She had, too, the command of a fly, done up to look like
a private brougham, a servant in livery, the run of the public
assembly-rooms, a sitting in the centre of the most fashionable
church in Brighton--all that the heart of woman could desire. All
but the one thing was there; but, that one thing being absent, she
came moodily back to town at the end of September. She would have
exchanged them all with a happy heart for very moderate accommodation
at Margate, could she have seen M