Singularly enough, her companion, before she had permitted herself to interpose, took up her own thought (in one of its parts) and remarked that perhaps she would say of the child that he was, so far as his actual circumstances were concerned, low enough down in the world without one’s wanting him to be any lower. “But by the time he’s twenty he’ll persuade himself that Lomax Place was a bad dream, that your lodgers and your dressmaking were as imaginary as they are vulgar, and that when an old friend came to see you late at night it was not your amiable practice to make him a glass of brandy and water. He’ll teach himself to forget all this: he’ll have a way.” “Do you mean he’ll forget _me_, he’ll deny me?” cried Miss Pynsent, stopping the movement of her needle short off for the first time. “As the person designated in that attractive blazonry on the outside of your house decidedly he will; and me, equally, as a bald-headed, pot-bellied fiddler who regarded you as the most perfect lady of his acquaintance. I don’t mean he’ll disown you and pretend he never knew you: I don’t think he’ll ever be such an odious little cad as that; he probably won’t be a sneak, and he strikes me as having some affection and possibly even some gratitude in him. But his imagination (which will always give him his cue about everything) shall subject you to some extraordinary metamorphosis. He’ll dress you up.” “He’ll dress me up?” Amanda ejaculated, quite ceasing to follow the train of Mr. Vetch’s demonstration. “Do you mean he’ll have the property—that his relations will take him up?” “My dear, delightful, idiotic Pinnie, I’m speaking in a figurative manner. I don’t pretend to say what his precise position will be when we’re relegated; but I’m sure relegation will be our fate. Therefore don’t stuff him with any more false notions and fine illusions than are necessary to keep him alive; he’ll be sure to pick up enough on the way. On the contrary, give him a good stiff dose of the truth at the start.” “Deary me, of course you see much further into it than I could ever do,” Pinnie murmured as she threaded a needle. Mr. Vetch paused a minute, but apparently not out of deference to this amiable interruption. He went on suddenly with a ring of feeling in his voice. “Let him know, because it will be useful to him later, the state of the account between society and himself; he can then conduct himself accordingly. If he’s the illegitimate child of a French impropriety who murdered one of her numerous lovers, don’t shuffle out of sight so important a fact. I regard that as a most valuable origin.” “Lord, Mr. Vetch, how you _can_ talk!” cried Miss Pynsent with her ever-fresh faculty of vain protest. “I don’t know what one would think, to hear you.”