‘I wanted to give Timperley a decent dinner,’ Mr. Piper would reply. ‘Hang it, Moggie! when I go to Timperley’s he feeds me on the fat of the land. Besides, we can afford it.’ ‘Nobody can afford wanton extravagance,’ Mrs. Piper would groan; and this kind of conversation would occur daily. Thus it was a new thing to Mr. Piper to have his domestic life administered with liberal-handed luxury, to hear no complaints about the misconduct of servants or the price of provisions, not to be awakened abruptly from his after-dinner nap to be told that bread had gone up a halfpenny, or that Scrogfield was charging thirteen-pence for fillet of veal. ‘Upon my word, little woman,’ he exclaimed one day, delighted with his wife’s cleverness, ‘you have made the house a paradise.’ It was still more a paradise after Christmas, for the second Mrs. Piper, having found out that her step-daughters were sadly in want of dancing and calisthenics, which they could not be taught properly at home, and would be much benefited by being transplanted to Miss Turk’s boarding school, on the outskirts of Great Yafford, the school at which Mrs. Dulcimer and all the best people in the neighbourhood had been educated, under the aunts and predecessors of the reigning Miss Turk. Mr. Piper was rather disappointed, just at first, by this idea of Bella’s. He had hoped to have his daughters always at home. They were troublesome, rude, and noisy, but still Mr. Piper loved them, as the gladiator loved his young barbarians. ‘I thought you would have gone on teaching the girls, little woman,’ he said, with a chap-fallen air. ‘My dear Mr. Piper, what time should I have for society, or for you, if I did that? Quite impossible. Besides, the girls will be a great deal better at a first-rate school. They are too high-spirited to obey me, and now I am their mamma they would laugh at my attempts to teach them.’ Mr. Piper sighed and submitted. The boys went to school, as a matter of course. He had no objection to that. But he had hoped that his daughters would stay at home, and cheer his breakfast-table with their chubby common-place faces and small second-hand jokes, and thump their pianoforte duets of an evening for his delectation. One evil which Mr. Piper had feared in taking Bella for his wife had not befallen him. He had fancied that the Park would be overrun with Scratchells, that Bella, as an affectionate member of a large family, would want to make his house a free warren for her father and mother, brothers and sisters.