The girl's folly and perverseness on this head were known to them all,--but as yet her greater folly and worse perverseness, her vitiated taste and dreadful partiality for the Portuguese adventurer, were known but to the two old men and to poor Arthur himself. When that sternly magnificent old lady, Mrs. Fletcher,--whose ancestors had been Welsh kings in the time of the Romans,--when she should hear this story, the roof of the old hall would hardly be able to hold her wrath and her dismay! The old kings had died away, but the Fletchers, and the Vaughans,--of whom she had been one,--and the Whartons remained, a peculiar people in an age that was then surrendering itself to quick perdition, and with peculiar duties. Among these duties, the chiefest of them incumbent on females was that of so restraining their affections that they should never damage the good cause by leaving it. They might marry within the pale,--or remain single, as might be their lot. She would not take upon herself to say that Emily Wharton was bound to accept Arthur Fletcher, merely because such a marriage was fitting,--although she did think that there was much perverseness in the girl, who might have taught herself, had she not been stubborn, to comply with the wishes of the families. But to love one below herself, a man without a father, a foreigner, a black Portuguese nameless Jew, merely because he had a bright eye, and a hook nose, and a glib tongue,--that a girl from the Whartons should do this--! It was so unnatural to Mrs. Fletcher that it would be hardly possible to her to be civil to the girl after she had heard that her mind and taste were so astray. All this Sir Alured knew and the barrister knew it,--and they feared her indignation the more because they sympathised with the old lady's feelings. "Emily Wharton doesn't seem to me to be a bit more gracious than she used to be," Mrs. Fletcher said to Lady Wharton that night. The two old ladies were sitting together upstairs, and Mrs. John Fletcher was with them. In such conferences Mrs. Fletcher always domineered,--to the perfect contentment of old Lady Wharton, but not equally so to that of her daughter-in-law. "I'm afraid she is not very happy," said Lady Wharton. "She has everything that ought to make a girl happy, and I don't know what it is she wants. It makes me quite angry to see her so discontented. She doesn't say a word, but sits there as glum as death. If I were Arthur I would leave her for six months, and never speak to her during the time." "I suppose, mother," said the younger Mrs. Fletcher,--who called her husband's mother, mother, and her own mother, mamma,--"a girl needn't marry a man unless she likes him." "But she should try to like him if it is suitable in other respects. I don't mean to take any trouble about it. Arthur needn't beg for any favour. Only I wouldn't have come here if I had thought that she had intended to sit silent like that always."