But of these last Marcella realised nothing.  What she was saying to herself was that, if they knew little of her, she knew a great deal of many of them.  In their talks over the Stone Parlour fire she and Wharton had gone through most of the properties, large and small, of his division, and indeed of the divisions round, by the help of the knowledge he had gained in his canvass, together with a blue-book—­one of the numberless!—­recently issued, on the state of the midland labourer.  He had abounded in anecdote, sarcasm, reflection, based partly on his own experiences, partly on his endless talks with the working-folk, now in the public-house, now at their own chimney-corner.  Marcella, indeed, had a large unsuspected acquaintance with the county before she met it in the flesh.  She knew that a great many of these men who came and spoke to her were doing their best according to their lights, that improvements were going on, that times were mending.  But there were abuses enough still, and the abuses were far more vividly present to her than the improvements.  In general, the people who thronged these splendid rooms were to her merely the incompetent members of a useless class.  The nation would do away with them in time!  Meanwhile it might at least be asked of them that they should practise their profession of landowning, such as it was, with greater conscience and intelligence—­that they should not shirk its opportunities or idle them away.  And she could point out those who did both—­scandalously, intolerably.  Once or twice she thought passionately of Minta Hurd, washing and mending all day, in her damp cottage; or of the Pattons in “the parish house,” thankful after sixty years of toil for a hovel where the rain came through the thatch, and where the smoke choked you, unless, with the thermometer below freezing-point, you opened the door to the blast.  Why should these people have all the gay clothes, the flowers, the jewels, the delicate food—­all the delight and all the leisure?  And those, nothing!  Her soul rose against what she saw as she stood there, going through her part.  Wharton’s very words, every inflection of his voice was in her ears, playing chorus to the scene.

But when these first introductions, these little empty talks of three or four phrases apiece, and all of them alike, were nearly done with, Marcella looked eagerly round for Mary Harden.  There she was, sitting quietly against the wall in a remote corner, her plain face all smiles, her little feet dancing under the white muslin frock which she had fashioned for herself with so much pain under Marcella’s directions.  Miss Raeburn was called away to find an arm-chair for some dowager of importance; Marcella took advantage of the break and of the end of a dance to hurry down the room to Mary.  Aldous, who was talking to old Sir Charles Leven, Frank’s father, a few steps off, nodded and smiled to her as he saw her move.

“Have you been dancing, Mary?” she said severely.