“There is certainly no necessity for pineries and forcing-houses. Your niece is not likely to want grapes in January, or camellias in the early autumn. As little does she need sixteen carriage-horses and a stable full of hunters.” “They are to be sold off next week. Mary herself said that she only wanted two saddle-horses and the pony for the phaeton.” “Quite sufficient, I should say, for a young lady.” “I 'm sure she 'd have liked to have kept the harriers--” “A pack of hounds! I really never heard the like!” “Poor Molly! It was her greatest pleasure,--I may say her only amusement in life. But she would n't hear of keeping them; and when Repton tried to persuade her--” “Repton's an old fool,--he's worse; he's downright dishonest,--for he actually proposed my paying my maids out of my miserable pittance of eight hundred a year, and at the same moment suggests your niece retaining a pack of foxhounds!” “Harriers, my Lady.” “I don't care what they 're called. It is too insolent.” “You may rely upon one thing,” said Martin, with more firmness than he had hitherto used, “there will be nothing of extravagance in Mary's personal expenditure. If ever there was a girl indifferent to all the claims of self, she is that one.” “If we continue this discussion, sir, at our present rate, I opine that by the time we reach Dublin your niece will have become an angel.” Martin dropped his head, and was silent; and although her Ladyship made two or three other efforts to revive the argument, he seemed resolved to decline the challenge, and so they rolled along the road sullen and uncommunicative. In the second carriage were Repton and Kate Henderson,--an arrangement which the old lawyer flatteringly believed he owed to his cunning and address, but which in reality was ordained by Lady Dorothea, whose notions of rank and precedence were rigid. Although Repton's greatest tact lay in his detection of character, he felt that he could not satisfactorily affirm he had mastered the difficulty in the present case. She was not exactly like anything he had met before; her mode of thought, and even some of her expressions were so different that the old lawyer owned to himself, “It was like examining a witness through an interpreter.” A clever talker--your man of conversational success--is rarely patient under the failure of his powers, and, not very unreasonably perhaps, very ready to ascribe the ill-success to the defects of his hearer. They had not proceeded more than half of the first post ere Repton began to feel the incipient symptoms of this discontent.