‘They might,’ she said sighing. ‘I am a tuft-hunter. I can’t help it. And yet we _are_ a good family, you know. I suppose it was that year at Court, and that horrid Warham afterward. Twenty years in a cathedral town--and a very _little_ cathedral town, after Windsor, and Buckingham Palace, and dear Lord Melbourne! Every year I came up to town to stay with my father for a month in the season, and if it hadn’t been for that I should have died--my husband knew I should. It was the world, the flesh, and the devil, of course, but it couldn’t be helped. But now,’ and she looked plaintively at her companion, as though challenging him to a candid reply: ‘You _would_ be more interesting, wouldn’t you, to tell the truth, if you had a handle to your name?’ ‘Immeasurably,’ cried Robert, stifling his laughter with immense difficulty, as he saw she had no inclination to laugh. ‘Well, yes, you know. But it isn’t right;’ and again she sighed. ‘And so I have been writing this novel just for that. It is called--what do you think?--“Mr. Jones.” Mr. Jones is my hero--it’s so good for me, you know, to think about a Mr. Jones.’ She looked beamingly at him. ‘It must be indeed! Have you endowed him with every virtue?’ ‘Oh yes, and in the end, you know--’ and she bent forward eagerly--‘it all comes right. His father didn’t die in Brazil without children after all, and the title--’ ‘What,’ cried Robert, ‘so he _wasn’t_ Mr. Jones?’ Mrs. Darcy looked a little conscious. ‘Well, no,’ she said guiltily, ‘not just at the end. But it really doesn’t matter--not to the story.’ Robert shook his head, with a look of protest as admonitory as he could make it, which evoked in her an answering expression of anxiety. But just at that moment a loud wave of conversation and of laughter seemed to sweep down upon them from the other end of the table, and their little private eddy was effaced. The Squire had been telling an anecdote, and his clerical neighbors had been laughing at it. ‘Ah!’ cried Mr. Longstaffe, throwing himself back in his chair with a chuckle, ‘that was an Archbishop worth having!’ ‘A curious story,’ said Mr. Bickerton, benevolently, the point of it, however, to tell the truth, not being altogether clear to him. It seemed to Robert that the Squire’s keen eye, as he sat looking down the table, with his large nervous hands clasped before him, was specially fixed upon himself. ‘May we hear the story?’ he said, bending forward. Catherine, faintly smiling in her corner beside the host, was looking a little flushed and moved out of her ordinary quiet.