Said Miss Buff confidentially, “There is a vast deal more in surroundings, Bessie, than people like to admit.  We are all under their influence.  If we had seen you at Abbotsmead, we might have pitied your sacrifice, but when we see you at the doctor’s in your sprigged cambric dresses, and your beautiful wavy hair in the style we remember, it seems the most right and natural thing in the world that you should marry Mr. Harry Musgrave—­no condescension in it.  But I did not quite feel that while you were at Fairfield, though I commended your resolution to have your own way.  Now that you are here you are just Bessie Fairfax—­only the doctor’s little daughter.  And that goes in proof of what I always maintain—­that grand people, where they are not known, ought never to divest themselves of the outward and visible signs of their grandness; for Nature has not been bountiful to them all with either wit or sense, manners or beauty, though there are toadies everywhere able to discern in them the virtues and graces suitable to their rank.”

“Lady Latimer looks her part upon the stage,” said Bessie.

“But how many don’t!  The countess of Harbro’, for instance; who that did not know her would take her for anything but a common person?  Insolent woman she is!  She found fault with the choir to me last Sunday, as if I were a singing-mistress and she paid my salary.  Has old Phipps confessed how you have astonished him and falsified his predictions?”

“I am not aware that I have done anything to astonish anybody.  I fancied that I had pleased Mr. Phipps rather than otherwise,” said Bessie with a quiet smile.

“And so you have.  He is gratified that a young lady of quality should have the pluck to make a marriage of affection in a rank so far below her own, considering nothing but the personal worth of the man she marries.”

“I have never been able to discover the hard and fast conventional lines that are supposed to separate ranks.  There is an affectation in these matters which practically deludes nobody.  A liberal education and the refinements of wealth are too extensively diffused for those whose pride it is that they have done nothing but vegetate on one spot of land for generations to hold themselves aloof as a superior caste.  The pretensions of some of them are evident, but only evident to be ridiculous—­like the pretensions of those who, newly enriched by trade, decline all but what they describe as carriage-company.”

“The poor gentry are eager enough to marry money, but that does not prevent them sneering at the way the money is made,” Miss Buff said.  “Even Lady Latimer herself, speaking of the family who have taken Admiral Parkins’s house for three months, said it was a pity they should come to a place like Beechhurst, for the gentlefolk would not call upon them, and they would feel themselves above associating with the tradespeople.  They are the great tea-dealers in Cheapside.”