"As you aware, Lady Lydiard, that
the doubt you have just expressed is an insult to my niece, and a insult
to Me?"
"Are _you_ aware of who Mr. Hardyman really is?" retorted her Ladyship.
"Or do you judge of his position by the vocation in life which he has
perversely chosen to adopt? I can tell you, if you do, that Alfred
Hardyman is the younger son of one of the oldest barons in the English
Peerage, and that his mother is related by marriage to the Royal family
of Wurtemberg."
Miss Pink received the full shock of this information without receding
from her position by a hair-breadth.
"An English gentlewoman offers a fit alliance to any man living who
seeks her hand in marriage," said Miss Pink. "Isabel's mother (you may
not be aware of it) was the daughter of an English clergyman--"
"And Isabel's father was a chemist in a country town," added Lady
Lydiard.
"Isabel's father," rejoined Miss Pink, "was attached in a most
responsible capacity to the useful and honorable profession of Medicine.
Isabel is, in the strictest sense of the word, a young gentlewoman. If
you contradict that for a single instant, Lady Lydiard, you will oblige
me to leave the room."
Those last words produced a result which Miss Pink had not
anticipated--they roused Lady Lydiard to assert herself. As usual in
such cases, she rose superior to her own eccentricity. Confronting
Miss Pink, she now spoke and looked with the gracious courtesy and the
unpresuming self-confidence of the order to which she belonged.
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