But the fact remained that, even to the spacious Manor House, no lady guests were invited to dinner; no lady guests stayed for twenty-four hours; and, beyond a few afternoon callers, no ladies visited the house at all. But perhaps in Daneford there were not a dozen families in possession of the fact that would account for the strict retirement in which the mistress of the Manor lived, and the young and the chivalric continued to look on Grey and his wife as not only the most prosperous, but also the most happy, couple in the whole county. Very soon after Henry Grey's marriage with Miss Muir, he found out that she did not possess the solid good sense and grave discernment essential in the confidant of a banker. She not only lacked the golden faculty of silence, but dealt with facts communicated to her in a most imaginative and injudicious manner. He told her that a substantial and solvent merchant of the town had overdrawn his account five hundred pounds. Shortly after, the merchant's wife called on Mrs. Grey, and the latter, in a moment of communicativeness, said to the former that business was in a bad way, and that she understood the former's husband owed the Bank, over and above ordinary business, no less a sum than five thousand pounds. The merchant's wife related this to her husband, and he came in great indignation to Grey. Mr. Grey said his wife's talk had been only woman's gossip, and that he had most certainly never told his wife or any one else the merchant owed the Bank five thousand pounds over-draught. The merchant said he was quite sure Mr. Grey had not, but urged that something of the over-draught must have been communicated to Mrs. Grey, and that a woman's gossip was quite capable of ruining a solvent man. On another occasion the banker told her the Bank had not made as much money that year as the year before, and she informed some chance callers that the Bank was losing heavily. This rumour might have shaken the credit of an institution less solidly established than the Daneford Bank; but in the city and country surrounding the city the Bank was looked upon as much more safe than the Bank of England, insomuch as the Threadneedle Street concern had a paper currency, and the Daneford did not mortgage any of its capital by such an issue, and stood in no temptation to diminish its stock of gold or overstep safety. These two experiences of Grey's, coupled with a few others of less importance but similar nature, convinced him that the more general and abstract his statements of business matters to his wife the better, and from the moment he arrived at this conclusion he carried it into effect. She, having no talent for the particular, did not seem to miss his confidence, and remained perfectly content with commonplace generalities as to business matters. Indeed, having very little of the highly feminine virtue of inquisitiveness, she was not much interested in business statements of any kind.