‘Aunt always looks as if she were the leader of the fashion wherever she goes,’ said Emily proudly. She it was who was conscious of being the only one who was like her aunt. ‘Thank you for such a pretty compliment,’ said Lady William; ‘but Florry is right, I am sorry to say. We shall all be so much below her standard at our best, that a little more or less doesn’t matter. Still, without reference to Mrs. Swinford or her impressions, it is unpleasant to get wet.’ ‘Then you vote for the fly,’ said Emmy with satisfaction, ‘that is what I always thought you would do. One does not get blown about, one comes out fresh, without having one’s hair all wild and marks of mud upon one’s shoes. Thanks, Aunt Emily, you always decide for what is best.’ In an hour, however, they returned, Florry, who was not going, leading the way. ‘Mamma thinks as it’s so much brighter our own pony-chaise will do. It’s much nicer being in the air than boxed up in a fly. And she thinks it would make so much fuss, setting all the village talking, if the fly was ordered, and it was known everywhere that she was going to the Hall.’ ‘I thought she wished it to be known.’ ‘Oh, of course,’ said Emmy, who was the aggrieved party, ‘mamma wishes everything to be known. She says a clergyman’s family should always live in a glass house and all that sort of thing. And to have the pony-chaise out, and everybody seeing where we are going, will be just the same thing.’ ‘At all events it’s your own private carriage, and not a nasty hired fly,’ said Florence. ‘“Mrs. Plowden’s carriage at the door,” and you needn’t explain it’s a shandrydan.’ And the unfeeling girl laughed, as was her way: for it was not she who was going to have her fringe disarranged, and the locks at the back blown about by driving in the pony-carriage in the whistling March breeze. ‘Tell your mother I think the pony-chaise will do quite well if she likes it; everybody knows what sort of a carriage a country clergyman can afford to keep.’ ‘But you are not a country clergyman, Aunt Emily.’ ‘Heaven forbid!’ that lady said. Next time it was Emily alone who ran ‘across,’ as they called it. ‘Mamma thinks on the whole we might walk. The roads have dried up beautifully, and it’s not far. And walking is always correct in the country, isn’t it, aunt?’ ‘It is always correct anywhere, Emmy, when you have no other way to go.’ ‘Ah, but we have two other ways to go! There is the fly, which I should prefer, as it protects one most, and there’s our own pony-chaise. It cannot be supposed to be for the want of means of driving, Aunt Emily, if we pleased.’ ‘Of course not,’ said Lady William with great gravity. ‘And there is a gipsy van somewhere about. I have always thought I should like to drive about the country in a gipsy van.’