The county people had been condescendingly civil to the new Mrs. Piper; but that was all. They called upon her, and contemplated her curiously, as if she had been something to wonder at, like the only living gorilla. She was asked to three large dinners, at which she felt herself less than nobody--though she wore laces and jewels enough for a dowager of ancient lineage. Bella, clever as she was, found that these people’s thoughts were not her thoughts, nor their ways her ways--and that all the distance between the east and west was not wider than the gulf between her and the county families. But this was a surmountable difficulty, she told herself. She was quick at learning languages, and would learn the jargon of the county families as easily as she had learned Italian. These scraps of social slang, these continual allusions to people she did not know, and pleasures she had never shared, could hardly be so difficult as Dante. Mr. Piper looked on and admired, while his young wife wasted his money, laughed at his friends, and made light of his opinions; but he was not altogether satisfied or easy in his mind. It would not be always so, he thought. There would come a day! The Duchess was carrying things with a high hand. It was perhaps just as well to let her have her fling. She was so unaccustomed to the command of money, poor little woman, that she might be forgiven for spending it somewhat recklessly. And, after all, this increased expenditure was pleasanter than poor Moggie’s carefulness and perpetual lamentations about butcher’s bills and pounds of butter. Mr. Piper liked his new butler, and was even in his heart of hearts not displeased with the powdered footman or the top-booted groom, though he affected to despise those follies. He felt himself on a level with the Timperleys in their scarlet Tudor mansion, with its jutting windows and leaden lattices, its deep porch and iron-studded door, its gilded vane and many gables, at once intensely old and dazzlingly new. He was living as became his wealth and social status, living like the Porkmans and the Wigzells, and the rest of his purse-proud acquaintance. The first Mrs. Piper had hung upon him like a log on a hobbled donkey, and had deprived him of all freedom, with her ever-lasting economical scruples. He had been afraid to give a dinner party, knowing that for a month after there would be ceaseless wailings about the expense of the feast. ‘Piper, have you any idea what grouse were when you asked Mr. Timperley to dinner last August?’ Mrs. Piper would demand. ‘I know the brace we had were uncommonly tough, and precious badly cooked,’ Mr. Piper would retort. ‘They were twelve shillings a brace, Piper. Here’s the poulterer’s bill to prove it to you. I call it sinful to eat game at such a price. You know _you_ ordered them, Piper. I should have inquired what they were to cost--but you never do.’