Giving a semicircular sweep of his arm:  “Here you see my little estate, sir,” he said.  “You’ve seen plenty bigger in Germany, and England too.  We can’t get more than this handful in our tight little island.  Unless born to it, of course.  Well! we must be grateful that all our nobility don’t go to the dogs.  We must preserve our great names.  I speak against my own interest.”

He lifted Adela’s chin on his forefinger.  She kept her eyes demurely downward, and then gazed at her sisters with gravity.  These ladies took a view of Mr. Barrett.  His features wore an admirable expression of simple interest.  “Well, sir; suppose you dine with us to-day?” Mr. Pole bounced out.  “Neighbours should be neighbourly.”

This abrupt invitation was decorously accepted.

“Plain dinner, you know.  Nothing like what you get at the tables of those Erzhogs, as you call ’em, over in Germany.  Simple fare; sound wine!  At all events, it won’t hurt you.  You’ll come?”

Mr. Barrett bowed, murmuring thanks.  This was the very man Mr. Pole wanted to have at his board occasionally:  one who had known great people, and would be thankful for a dinner.  He could depreciate himself as a mere wealthy British merchant imposingly before such a man.  His daughters had completely cut him off from his cronies; and the sense of restriction, and compression, and that his own house was fast becoming alien territory to him, made him pounce upon the gentlemanly organist.  His daughters wondered why he should, in the presence of this stranger, exaggerate his peculiar style of speech.  But the worthy merchant’s consciousness of his identity was vanishing under the iron social rule of the ladies.  His perishing individuality prompted the inexplicable invitation, and the form of it.

After Mr. Barrett had departed, the ladies ventured to remonstrate with their papa.  He at once replied by asking whether the letter to Mrs. Chump had been written; and hearing that it had not, he desired that Arabella should go into the house and compose it straightway.  The ladies coloured.  To Adela’s astonishment, she found that Arabella had turned.  Joining her, she said, “Dearest, what a moment you have lost!  We could have stood firm, continually changing the theme from Chump to Barrett, Barrett to Chump, till papa’s head would have twirled.  He would have begun to think Mr. Barrett the Irish widow, and Mrs. Chump the organist.”

Arabella rejoined:  “Your wit misleads you, darling.  I know what I am about.  I decline a wordy contest.  To approach to a quarrel, or, say dispute, with one’s parent apropos of such a person, is something worse than evil policy, don’t you think?”

So strongly did the sisters admire this delicate way of masking a piece of rank cowardice, that they forgave her.  The craven feeling was common to them all, which made it still more difficult to forgive her.

“Of course, we resist?” said Cornelia.