neighbouring house of Newcome,
whither my wife accompanied Madame de Moncontour at that lady's own
request, to whom Laura very properly did not think fit to confide her
antipathy for Lady Clara Newcome. Coming away from a great house, how
often she and I, egotistical philosophers, thanked our fates that our
own home was a small one! How long will great houses last in this
world? Do not their owners now prefer a lodging at Brighton, or a little
entresol on the Boulevard, to the solitary ancestral palace in a park
barred round with snow? We were as glad to get out of Newcome as out of
a prison. My wife and our hostess skipped into the carriage, and began
to talk freely as the lodge-gates closed after us. Would we be lords
of such a place under the penalty of living in it? We agreed that the
little angle of earth called Fairoaks was dearer to us than the clumsy
Newcome-pile of Tudor masonry. The house had been fitted up in the time
of George IV. and the quasi-Gothic revival. We were made to pass
through Gothic dining-rooms, where there was now no hospitality,--Gothic
drawing-rooms shrouded in brown hollands, to one little room at the end
of the dusky suite, where Lady Clara sate alone, or in the company of
the nurses and children. The blank gloom of the place had fallen upon
the poor lady. Even when my wife talked about children (good-natured
Madame de Moncontour vaunting ours as a prodigy) Lady Clara did not
brighten up! Her pair of young ones was exhibited and withdrawn. A
something weighed upon the woman. We talked about Ethel's marriage.
She said it was fixed for the new year, she believed. She did not know
whether Glenlivat had been very handsomely fitted up. She had not seen
Lord Farintosh's house in London. Sir Barnes came down once--twice--of a
Saturday sometimes, for three or four days to hunt, to amuse himself, as
all men do she supposed. She did not know when he was coming again. She
rang languidly when we rose to take leave, and sank back on her sofa,
where lay a heap of French novels. "She has chosen some pretty books,"
says Paul, as we drove through the sombre avenues through the grey
park, mists lying about the melancholy ornamental waters, dingy herds
of huddled sheep speckling the grass here and there; no smoke rising up
from the great stacks of chimneys of the building we were leaving behind
us, save one little feeble thread of white which we knew came from the
fire by which the lonely mistress of Newcome w