Muriel shook her head.  “It’s no good posing when we are by ourselves.  As a family we totally lack charm.  Minnie tries to make up for it by a great deal of manner and a loud voice.  Gordon—­well, it doesn’t matter so much for a man, but you can see his friends don’t really care about him much.  They take his hospitality and say he isn’t a bad sort.  They know he is a snob, and when he tries to be funny he is often offensive, poor Gordon!  I’ve got a pretty face, and I play games well, so I am tolerated, but I have hardly one real friend.  The worst of it is I know all the time where I am falling short, and I can’t help it.  I feel myself jar on people.  I once heard old Mrs. Hope say that it doesn’t matter how vulgar we are, so long as we know we are being vulgar.  But that isn’t true.  It’s not much fun to know you are being vulgar and not be able to help it.”

Mrs. Duff-Whalley gave a convulsed ejaculation, but her daughter went on.

“Sometimes I’ve gone in of an afternoon to see Jean, and found her darning stockings in her shabby frock, with a look on her face as if she knew some happy secret; a sort of contented, brooding look—­and I’ve envied her.  And so I talked of all the gaieties I was going to, of the new clothes I was getting, of the smart people we know, and all the time I was despising myself for a fool, for what did Jean care!  She sat there with her mind full of books and poetry and those boys she is so absurdly devoted to; it was nothing to her how much I bucked; and this fortune won’t change her.  Money is nothing—­”

Mrs. Duff-Whalley gasped despairingly to hear her cherished daughter talking, as she thought, rank treason.

“Oh, Muriel, how you can!  And your poor father working so hard to make a pile so that we could all be nice and comfortable.  And you were his favourite, and I’ve often thought how proud he would have been to see his little girl so smart and pretty and able to hold her own with the best of them.  And I’ve worked too.  Goodness knows I’ve worked hard.  It isn’t as easy as it looks to keep your end up in Priorsford and keep the villa-people in their places, and force the County to notice you.  If I had been like Mrs. Jowett you would just have had to be content with the people on the Hill.  Do you suppose I haven’t known they didn’t want to come here and visit us?  Oh, I knew, but I made them.  And it was all for you.  What did I care for them and their daft-like ways and their uninteresting talk about dogs and books and things!  It would have been far nicer for me to have made friends with the people in the little villas.  My!  I’ve often thought how I would relish a tea-party at the Watsons’!  Your father used to have a saying about it being better to be at the head of the commonalty than at the tail of the gentry, and I know it’s true.  Mrs. Duff-Whalley of The Towers would be a big body at the Miss Watsons’ tea-parties, and I know fine I’m only tolerated at the Tweedies’ and the Olivers’ and all the others.”