can fly."

"I can lend you, Pitt, till then," Rawdon answered rather ruefully; and
they went in and looked at the restored lodge, where the family arms
were just new scraped in stone, and where old Mrs. Lock, for the first
time these many long years, had tight doors, sound roofs, and whole
windows.

CHAPTER XLV

Between Hampshire and London

Sir Pitt Crawley had done more than repair fences and restore
dilapidated lodges on the Queen's Crawley estate. Like a wise man he
had set to work to rebuild the injured popularity of his house and stop
up the gaps and ruins in which his name had been left by his
disreputable and thriftless old predecessor. He was elected for the
borough speedily after his father's demise; a magistrate, a member of
parliament, a county magnate and representative of an ancient family,
he made it his duty to show himself before the Hampshire public,
subscribed handsomely to the county charities, called assiduously upon
all the county folk, and laid himself out in a word to take that
position in Hampshire, and in the Empire afterwards, to which he
thought his prodigious talents justly entitled him. Lady Jane was
instructed to be friendly with the Fuddlestones, and the Wapshots, and
the other famous baronets, their neighbours. Their carriages might
frequently be seen in the Queen's Crawley avenue now; they dined pretty
frequently at the Hall (where the cookery was so good that it was clear
Lady Jane very seldom had a hand in it), and in return Pitt and his
wife most energetically dined out in all sorts of weather and at all
sorts of distances. For though Pitt did not care for joviality, being
a frigid man of poor hearth and appetite, yet he considered that to be
hospitable and condescending was quite incumbent on-his station, and
every time that he got a headache from too long an after-dinner
sitting, he felt that he was a martyr to duty. He talked about crops,
corn-laws, politics, with the best country gentlemen. He (who had been
formerly inclined to be a sad free-thinker on these points) entered
into poaching and game preserving with ardour. He didn't hunt; he
wasn't a hunting man; he was a man of books and peaceful habits; but he
thought that the breed of horses must be kept up in the country, and
that the breed of foxes must therefore be looked to, and for his part,
if his friend, Sir Huddlestone Fuddlestone, liked to draw his country
and meet as of old the F. hounds used to do at Q