'How wonderfully well you well-bred women can make those you hate or envy feel that you look down upon them,' said Jerry, angrily. 'I have no doubt she feels amply compensated for all that by the flattery and attention of the gentlemen; she is quite a kind of garrison beauty,' retorted Emily. 'Why are all your remarks on that girl so dashed with vinegar--decided Chili?' asked Jerry. 'She gives herself airs far above her station in life.' 'Tush; we are all descended from Adam and Eve--a gardener and his wife.' 'You will never convince me that there is not good and bad blood in this world,' exclaimed Lady Wilmot. 'Bravo, mater--cast the scheme of creation anew! What are the odds so long as we are happy. But I think the time has now come when you should know the influence this young lady's father may have in our affairs.' Jerry now put before his horrified mother--horrified to hear of their necessity--the matter of the mortgages, and the full extent of these, and urged that she should show Bella some more marked attention, and less hauteur or supercilious indifference, and have her more often at the mansion house, to the guests at which she--a handsome girl, full of natural gaiety, and with a decided turn for charades, _tableaux-vivants_, private theatricals, lawn tennis, and games of all kinds--would prove invaluable. But Lady Wilmot heard him in silence, with a knit of her pencilled eyebrows and a droop in the corners of her handsome mouth. She could only think of these horrible mortgages, and the awful humiliation of half the estate being in the hands of Mr. Chevenix. 'The estate seems to be quite slipping from me,' said Jerry, after a gloomy pause. 'Slipping?' 'Yes, it is guineas to gooseberries that the rest will follow Langley Park and so forth.' 'Terrible to think--not to be thought of at all! Why, the estate has been the home of the Wilmots for four hundred years!' 'We can never recover what has been lost.' 'Unless you make a wealthy marriage, Jerry dear--such as you have every right to look forward to.' Jerry shrugged his shoulders, and pulled dreamily at his cigar after flicking the white ash off it. 'Let the mortgaged land go!' he exclaimed. 'I do not mean to dedicate my life by clearing that for others, which others did not clear for me.' 'Jerry!' 'Remember, mater dear, I have had only a little, and not all, to do in bringing matters to this pass with Wilmothurst, and I decline to act the part of a family martyr.' 'What will society say?' 'Society be hanged! I have read in a book, and I know it to be truth, that "Society at its best will entertain you if you amuse it, and will drop you, as a rule, upon the first suspicion of your wanting a twenty-pound note. Society saps your energy, snaps your finances, and half-a-dozen good attorneys are fifty times more valuable acquaintances than half the peerage would be at present."