“Portsmouth,” mused Mrs. Cobb. “You say, Mrs. Bingham, there are a good many officers there. Let me see—1815—it’s twenty-four years ago since the battle. A captain may have picked her up in Paris. I’ll be bound that, if she ever was married, she was married when she was sixteen or seventeen. They are always obliged to marry those French girls when they are nothing but chits, I’ve been told—those of them, leastways, that don’t live with men without being married. That would make her about forty, and then he found her out and left her, and she went back to Paris and learned dressmaking.” “But he writes to her from Portsmouth,” said Mrs. Bingham, who had not been told that the solitary letter from Portsmouth was addressed in a man’s handwriting. “He may not have broken with her altogether,” replied Mrs. Cobb. “If he isn’t a downright brute he’ll want to hear about his daughter.” “Well,” said Mrs. Sweeting, twitching her eyes as she was wont to do when she was about to give an opinion which she knew would disturb any of her friends, “you may talk as you like, but the last thing Swanley made for me looked as if it had been to the wash and hung on me to dry. French or English, captain or no captain, I shall go to Mrs. Fairfax. Her character’s got nothing to do with her cut. Suppose she _is_ divorced; judging from that body of yours, Mrs. Bingham, I shan’t have to send back a pelisse half a dozen times to get it altered. When it comes to that you get sick of the thing, and may just as well give it away.” Mrs. Sweeting occupied the lowest rank in this particular section of Langborough society. As a grocer Mr. Sweeting was not quite on a level with the coal dealer, who was a merchant, nor with the ironmonger, who repaired ploughs, and he was certainly below Mr. Bingham. Miss Tarrant, never having been “connected with trade”—her father was chief clerk in the bank—considered herself superior to all her acquaintances, but her very small income prevented her from claiming her superiority so effectively as she desired. “Mrs. Sweeting,” she said, “I am surprised at you! You do not consider what the moral effect on the lower orders of patronising a female of this kind will be, probably an abandoned woman. The child, no doubt, was not born in wedlock. We are sinners ourselves if we support sinners.” “Miss Tarrant,” retorted Mrs. Sweeting, “I’m the respectable mother of five children, and I don’t want any sermons on sin except in church. If it wasn’t a sin of Swanley to charge me three guineas for that pelisse, and wouldn’t take it back, I don’t know what sin.” Mrs. Bingham, although she was accustomed to tea-table disputes, and even enjoyed them, was a little afraid of Mrs. Sweeting’s tongue, and thought it politic to interfere.