It was the very next day when the governor’s wife came to call. In any case, Lady Modyford would have had to call on Marian; for etiquette demands, from the head of the colony at least, a strict disregard for distinctions of cuticle, real or imaginary. But Nora Dupuy had seen Lady Modyford that very morning, and had told her all the absurd story of the Hawthorns’ social disqualifications. Now, the governor’s wife was a woman of the world, accustomed to many colonial societies, big and small, as well as to the infinitely greater world of London; and she was naturally moved, at first hearing, rather to amusement than to indignation at the idea of Tom Dupuy setting himself up as the social superior of a fellow of Catherine’s and barrister of the Inner Temple. This point of view itself certainly lost nothing from Nora’s emphatic way of putting it; for, though Nora had herself a bountiful supply of fine old crusted West Indian prejudices, producible on occasion, and looked down upon ‘brown people’ of every shade with that peculiarly profound contempt possible only to a descendant of the old vanquished slave-owning oligarchy, yet her personal affection for Marian and Edward was quite strong enough to override all such abstract considerations of invisible colour; and her sense of humour was quite keen enough to make her feel the full ridiculousness of comparing such a man as Edward Hawthorn with her own loutish sugar-growing cousin. She had lived so long in England, as Tom Dupuy himself would have said, that she had begun to pick up at least some faint tincture of these newfangled Exeter Hall opinions; in other words, she had acquired a little ballast of common-sense and knowledge of life at large to weigh down in part her tolerably large original cargo of colonial prejudices. But when Nora came to tell Lady Modyford, as far as she knew them, the indignities to which the Hawthorns had already been subjected by the pure blue blood of Trinidad, the governor’s wife began to perceive there was more in it than matter for mere laughter; and she bridled up a little haughtily at the mention of Mr Tom Dupuy’s free-spoken comments, as overheard by Nora on the Orange Grove piazza. ‘Nigger people!’ the fat, good-natured, motherly, little body echoed, angrily. ‘Did he say nigger people, my dear?—What! a daughter of General Ord of the Bengal infantry—why, I came home from Singapore in the same steamer with her mother, the year my father went away from the Straits Settlements to South Australia! Do you mean to say, my dear, they won’t call upon her, because she’s married a son of that nice old Mr Hawthorn with the white beard up at Agualta! A perfect gentleman, too! Dear me, how very abominable! You must excuse my saying it, my child, but really you West Indian people do mistake your own little hole and corner for the great world, in a most extraordinary sort of a fashion. Now, confess to me, don’t you?’