To make herself amends for this mortification, she insisted upon throwing down the partition between the dining-room and her own bedchamber, that she might have one decent apartment at least fit for a rout. It was to no purpose that her friend Lucy, who was called in to assist in making up furniture, represented that this scheme of throwing bedchamber and dining-room into one would be attended with some inconveniences; for instance, that Mr. and Mrs. Ludgate would be obliged, in consequence of this improvement, to sleep in half of the maid’s garret, or to sit up all night. This objection was overruled by Mrs. Ludgate, whose genius, fertile in expedients, made every thing easy, by the introduction of a bed in the dining-room, in the shape of a sofa. The newly-enlarged apartment, she observed, would thus answer the double purposes of show and utility; and, as soon as the supper and card tables should be removed, the sofa-bed might be let down. She asserted that the first people in London manage in this way. Leonard could not contradict his lady, because she had a ready method of silencing him, by asking how he could possibly know any thing of life who had lived all his days, except Sundays, in Cranbourne-alley? Then, if any one of his father’s old notions of economy by chance twinged his conscience, Belle very judiciously asked how he ever came to think of her for a wife? “Since you have got a genteel wife,” said she, “it becomes you to live up to her notions, and to treat her as she and her friends have a right to expect. Before I married you, sir, none of the Perkins’s were in trade themselves, either directly or indirectly; and many’s the slights and reproaches I’ve met with from my own relations and former acquaintances, since my marriage, on account of the Ludgates being all tradesfolks; to which I always answer, that my Leonard is going to wash his hands of trade himself, and to make over all concern in the haberdashery line and shop to the young man below stairs, who is much better suited to such things.”