e poor Lizzie felt herself
alone in a crowd.

Who does not know that terrible feeling, and the all but
necessity that exists for the sufferer to pretend that he is not
suffering,--which again is aggravated by the conviction that the
pretence is utterly vain? This may be bad with a man, but with a
woman, who never looks to be alone in a crowd, it is terrible.
For five minutes, during which everybody else was speaking to
everybody,--for five minutes, which seemed to her to be an hour,
Lizzie spoke to no one, and no one spoke to her. Was it for such
misery as this that she was spending hundreds upon hundreds, and
running herself into debt? For she was sure that there would be debt
before she had parted with Mrs. Carbuncle. There are people, very
many people, to whom an act of hospitality is in itself a good
thing; but there are others who are always making calculations, and
endeavouring to count up the thing purchased against the cost. Lizzie
had been told that she was a rich woman,--as women go, very rich.
Surely she was entitled to entertain a few friends; and if Mrs.
Carbuncle and Miss Roanoke could hunt, it could not be that hunting
was beyond her own means. And yet she was spending a great deal of
money. She had seen a large waggon loaded with sacks of corn coming
up the hill to the Portray stables, and she knew that there would be
a long bill at the corn-chandler's. There had been found a supply
of wine in the cellars at Portray,--which at her request had been
inspected by her cousin Frank;--but it had been necessary, so he had
told her, to have much more sent down from London,--champagne, and
liqueurs, and other nice things that cost money. "You won't like not
to have them if these people are coming?" "Oh, no; certainly not,"
said Lizzie, with enthusiasm. What other rich people did, she would
do. But now, in her five minutes of misery, she counted it all
up, and was at a loss to find what was to be her return for her
expenditure. And then, if on this her first day she should have a
fall, with no tender hand to help her, and then find that she had
knocked out her front teeth!

But the cavalcade began to move, and then Lord George was by her
side. "You mustn't be angry if I seem to stick too close to you," he
said. She gave him her sweetest smile as she told him that that would
be impossible. "Because, you know, though it's the easiest thing in
the world to get along out hunting, and women never come to grief, a
p