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.

“Undoubtedly.”

“We retire and retire,” Adela remarked.  “We waste the royal forces.  But, dear me, that makes us insurgents!”

She laughed, being slightly frivolous.  Her elders had the proper sentimental worship of youth and its supposed quality of innocence, and caressed her.

At the ringing of the second dinner-bell, Mr. Pole ran to the foot of the stairs and shouted for Arabella, who returned no answer, and was late in her appearance at table.  Grace concluded, Mr. Pole said, “Letter gone?  I wanted to see it, you know.”

“It was as well not, papa,” Arabella replied.