“I would drive you both to Lostwithiel after lunch, and we could do our little bit of shopping and then have a cup of tea at the Talbot while the horses had their mouths washed out, and I’d show you the room where your brother’s wife was so much admired last year, Miss Leland, and where I hope you’ll have many a good dance next winter. Now the ice is broken we mean to go on with our balls, I can tell you. Indeed, my girls are thinking of trying to get up a tennis-club ball about the end of September.” This was the last time Mrs. Vansittart Crowther appeared in a friendly manner at the Angler’s Nest, for after two or three further invitations--to a picnic--to tea--to lunch--had been declined, in most gracious little notes from Isola, that good lady perceived that there was some kind of barrier to friendly intercourse between her and Colonel Disney’s wife, and she told herself with some touch of honest middle-class dignity that if Martin Disney was proud she could be proud too, and that she would make no further offer of friendship which was undesired. “I suppose he thinks because he comes of a good old family, while we have made our money in trade, that we are not quite good enough to associate with his wife and sister,” she said to her daughters. “I thought he was too much of a gentleman to have such a petty feeling.” “How innocent you are, mother,” cried Alicia, contemptuously; “can’t you see that they are all bursting with envy? That was what made the colonel so gloomy and disagreeable the night of our little dinner. He was vexed to see things done with as good taste as in a nobleman’s house. It cuts these poor gentilities to the quick to see that. They don’t much mind our being rich, if we will only be vulgar and uneducated. But when we have the impertinence to be as well up in the ways of good society as they are themselves, they can’t forgive us. Good taste in a parvenu is the unforgivable sin.” “Well, I don’t know,” mused Mrs. Crowther, sadly. “I’m sure there’s neither pride nor envy in Isola, and Miss Leland looks a frank, straightforward girl, above all foolish nonsense; so it must be the colonel’s fault that they’ve cut us.” “Cut us!” echoed Belinda; “the Angler’s Nest cutting Glenaveril is rather too absurd an idea.” “My dear, you don’t know the importance Cornish people attach to old family--and the Disneys are a very old family--and no one can deny that he is a gentleman, though we don’t like him.” “Oh, no doubt he considers that he belongs to the landed gentry. He has bought Rowe’s farm, two hundred and sixty acres. He had forty to begin with, so he is now lord of three hundred acres, just half our home farm.” “His cousin, Sir Luke Disney, has a large estate near Marazion,” said Mrs. Crowther, meekly. “Yes, but we don’t reckon a man’s importance by his cousin’s estate. Colonel Disney is only a squatter in this part of the country.”