Bessie did her best to amuse the great people, and the great people were pleased to approve her efforts. “You and your sisters, really must come over and stay with me,” Mrs. Poole Seymour was good enough at last to declare; and then Bessie had to explain she was not a Miss Dudley at all,—only a cousin wishful to help Mrs. Dudley at that trying period. A “sort of nurse,” added Bessie, mischievously, whereupon Agnes Dudley observed, “A very pearl of nurses; I do not know what we should have done without her;” at which little speech Mrs. Poole Seymour smiled graciously, and said they were good, sweet girls, of whom she trusted she should yet have the pleasure of seeing a great deal. “She has all the trust, and all the pleasure on her side, then,” remarked Bessie, after their visitor departed; but, in spite of this depreciating observation, there can be no question but that Miss Ormson liked playing hostess—that she delighted in trying her strength and testing her power on grand ladies who were to the manner born, and never seemed disturbed or put out by any circumstance, or any person. Another thing pleased her also—the vain coquettish puss—namely, to run up to her room after the various callers had departed, and looking in the glass consider how much prettier—how much more graceful she was than any of them. Mrs. Crompton Raidsford was amongst the earliest of Mrs. Dudley’s visitors. No one, not even the Earl’s daughter, who married Mr. Plimpton, of Thornfield—a man commonly believed to be rolling in wealth—came in such style to Berrie Down as the contractor’s wife. She had the shortest distance to drive of any lady in the neighbourhood, yet she arrived in a great chariot, drawn by a pair of horses, seventeen hands high if they were an inch, with coachman and footman on the box, and another footman behind. As Bessie subsequently remarked, “Anybody might have thought the Lord Mayor of London had come out in his state carriage to visit us. I really felt quite subdued by such unnecessary magnificence.” “And if you only saw Mrs. Raidsford, Heather,” she went on; “if you could only imagine the mass of satin, and velvet, and sable, and pretension and vulgarity, which descended, assisted by two footmen, from that chariot, you would be astonished to think Mr. Raidsford has lived with her so long. I never did behold such a woman. I dare not look at Agnes while she was talking. Do you think I could at first imagine whom she meant by ‘your gentleman,’ or conceive why she wanted to know what sized nursery you had? I consider it was most clever of Agnes to interrupt me when I was going to say I could get a rule from Cuthbert and measure it for her. How came you to guess, Aggy, that was her way of inquiring how many children Heather had? She said she hoped you would not think she had condescended in coming over so soon—” “What!” exclaimed Heather in astonishment.