Lady Aylmer was very plain-spoken on the subject of all Clara’s shortcomings very plain-spoken, and very inquisitive.  ’She will never have one shilling, I suppose?’ she said.

‘Yes, ma’am.’  Captain Aylmer always called his mother ‘ma’am’.  ’She will have that fifteen hundred pounds that I told you of.’

’That is to say, you will have back the money which you yourself have given her, Fred. I suppose that is the English of it?’ Then Lady Aylmer raised her eyebrows and looked very wise.

‘Just so, ma’am.’

’You can’t call that having anything of her own.  In point of fact she is penniless.’

‘It is no good harping on that,’ said Captain Aylmer, somewhat sharply.

’Not in the least, my dear; no good at all.  Of course you have looked it all in the face.  You will be a poor man instead of a rich man, but you will have enough to live on that is if she doesn’t have a large family which of course she will.’

‘I shall do very well, ma’am.’

’You might do pretty well, I dare say, if you could live privately at Perivale, keeping up the old family house there, and having no expenses; but you’ll find even that close enough with your seat in Parliament, and the necessity there is that you should be half the year in London.  Of course she won’t go to London.  She can’t expect it.  All that had better be made quite clear at once.’  Hence had come the letter about the house at Perivale, containing Lady Aylmer’s advice on that subject, as to which Clara made no reply.

Lady Aylmer, though she had given her assent, was still not altogether without hope.  It might be possible that the two young people could be brought to see the folly and error of their ways before it would be too late; and that Lady Aylmer, by a judicious course of constant advice, might be instrumental in opening the eyes, if not of ,the lady, at any rate of the gentleman.  She had great reliance on her own powers, and knew well that a falling drop will hollow a stone.  Her son manifested no hot eagerness to complete his folly in a hurry, and to cut the throat of his prospects out of hand.  Time, therefore, would be allowed to her, and she was a woman who could use time with patience.  Having, through her son, dispatched her advice about the house at Perivale which which simply amounted to this, that Clara should expressly state her willingness to live there alone whenever it might suit her husband to be in London or elsewhere she went to work on other points, connected with the Amedroz family, and eventually succeeded in learning something very much like the truth as to poor Mrs Askerton and her troubles.  At first she was so comfortably horror-stricken by the iniquity she had unravelled so delightfully shocked and astounded as to believe that the facts as they then stood would suffice to annul the match.

‘You don’t tell me’, she said to Belinda, ’that Frederic’s wife will have been the friend of such a woman as that!’ And Lady Aylmer, sitting upstairs with her household books before her, put up her great fat hands and her great fat arms, and shook her head front and all in most satisfactory dismay.