she is so anxious to know me?"

"My dear, you've no right to expect it; you haven't indeed. She never
calls even on me."

"I know I've no right, and I don't expect it, and I don't want
it. But neither has she a right to suppose that, under such
circumstances, I shall go to her house. You might as well give it up,
aunt. Cart ropes wouldn't drag me there."

"I think you are very wrong,--particularly under your present
circumstances. A young woman that is going to be married, as you
are--"

"As I am,--perhaps."

"That's nonsense, Alice. Of course you are; and for his sake you are
bound to cultivate any advantages that naturally belong to you. As to
Lady Midlothian or the marchioness coming to call on you here in your
father's house, after all that has passed, you really have no right
to look for it."

"And I don't look for it."

"That sort of people are not expected to call. If you'll think of it,
how could they do it with all the demands they have on their time?"

"My dear aunt, I wouldn't interfere with their time for worlds."

"Nobody can say of me, I'm sure, that I run after great people or
rich people. It does happen that some of the nearest relations I
have,--indeed I may say the nearest relations,--are people of high
rank; and I do not see that I'm bound to turn away from my own flesh
and blood because of that, particularly when they are always so
anxious to keep up the connexion."

"I was only speaking of myself, aunt. It is very different with you.
You have known them all your life."

"And how are you to know them if you won't begin? Lady Midlothian
said to me only yesterday that she was glad to hear that you were
going to be married so respectably, and then--"

"Upon my word I'm very much obliged to her ladyship. I wonder whether
she considered that she married respectably when she took Lord
Midlothian?"

Now Lady Midlothian had been unfortunate in her marriage, having
united herself to a man of bad character, who had used her ill, and
from whom she had now been for some years separated. Alice might have
spared her allusion to this misfortune when speaking of the countess
to the cousin who was so fond of her, but she was angered by the
application of that odious word respectable to her own prospects;
and perhaps the more angered as she was somewhat inclined to feel
that the epithet did suit her own position. Her engagement, she
had sometimes told herself, was very respectable, and had as often