And her
poor father had liked it so. As they wandered on through the pictures,
indeed, Lady Tatham soon came to know a great deal about Lydia's "poor
father"--that he had been a naval officer, a Captain Penfold, who had
had to retire early on half-pay because of ill-health, and had died
just as the girls had grown up. "He felt it so--he was so proud of
them--but he always said, 'If one of us is to go, why, it had better be
me, Rosina--because you have such spirits--you're so cheerful.' And I am.
I can't help it."
It was all sincere. There was neither snobbishness nor affectation in the
little widow, even when she prattled most embarrassingly about her own
affairs, or stood frankly wondering at the Tatham wealth. But no one
could deny it was untutored. Lady Tatham thought of all the Honourable
Johns, and Geralds, and Barbaras on the Tatham side--Harry's uncles and
cousins--and the various magnificent people, ranging up to royalty, on
her own; and envisaged the moment when Mrs. Penfold should look them all
in the face, with her pretty, foolish eyes, and her chatter about Lydia's
earnings and Lydia's blouses. And not all the inward laughter which the
notion provoked in one to whom life was largely comedy, in the
Meredithian sense, could blind her to the fact that the shock would be
severe.
Had she really injured the prospects of her boy by the way--the romantic,
idealist way--in which she had brought him up. Her Harry!--with whom she
had read poetry, and talked of heroes, into whose ears she had poured
Ruskin and Carlyle from his youth up; who was the friend and comrade of
all the country folk, because of a certain irrepressible interest in his
kind, a certain selflessness that were his cradle gifts; who shared in
his boyish way, her own amused contempt for shams and shows--had she,
after all, been training him for a mistake in the most serious step of
life?
For, like it or despise it, English society was there, and he must fill
his place in it.
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