Mr. Bullsom nodded.

“Yes,” he said, “I have the girls.  Look here, Mary,” he added, suddenly, looking her in the face, “I want to have a word with you.  I’m going to talk plainly.  Be honest with me.”

“Of course,” she murmured.

“It’s about the girls.  It’s a hard thing to say, but somehow—­I’m a bit disappointed with them.”

She looked at him in something like amazement.

“Yes, disappointed,” he continued.  “That’s the word.  I’m an uneducated man myself—­any fool can see that—­but I did all I could to have them girls different.  They’ve been to the best school in Medchester, and they’ve been abroad.  They’ve had masters in most everything, and I’ve had ’em taught riding and driving, and all that sort of thing, properly.  Then as they grew up I built this ’ouse, and came up to live here amongst the people whom I reckoned my girls’d be sure to get to know.  And the whole thing’s a damned failure, Mary.  That’s the long and short of it.”

“Perhaps—­a little later on” Mary began, hesitatingly.

“Don’t interrupt me,” he said, brusquely.  “This is the first honest talk I’ve ever had about it, and it’s doing me good.  The girls’d like to put it down to your mother and me, but I don’t believe it.  I’m ashamed to say it, but I’m afraid it’s the girls themselves.  There’s something not right about them, but I’m blessed if I know what it is.  Their mother and I are a bit vulgar, I know, but I’ve done my best to copy those who know how to behave—­and I believe we’d get through for what we are anywhere without giving offence.  But my girls oughtn’t to be vulgar.  It’s education as does away with that, and I’ve filled em chock-full of education from the time they were babies.  It’s run out of them, Mary, like the sands through an hour-glass.  They can speak correctly, and I dare say they know all the small society tricks.  But that isn’t everything.  They don’t know how to dress.  They can spend just as much as they like, and then you can come into the room in a black gown as you made yourself, and you look a lady, and they don’t.  That’s the long and short of it.  The only decent people who come to this house are your friends, and they come to see you.  There’s young Brooks, now.  I’ve no son, Mary, and I’m fond of young men.  I never knew one I liked as I like him.  My daughters are old enough to be married, and I’d give fifty thousand pounds to have him for a son-in-law.  And, of course, he won’t look at ’em.  He sees it.  He’ll talk to you.  He takes no more notice of them than is civil.  They fuss round him, and all that, but they might save themselves the pains.  It’s hard lines, Mary.  I’m making money as no one knows on.  I could live at Enton and afford it.  But what’s the good of it?  If people don’t care to know us here, they won’t anywhere.  Mary, how was it education didn’t work with them girls?  Your mother was my own sister, and she married a gentleman.  He was a blackguard, but hang it, Mary, if I were you I’d sooner be penniless and as you are than be my daughters with five thousand apiece.”