"How pretty it is!" she said--"It must be the nearness of the river that makes the tone of the bells so soft and mellow! Oh, what an insufferable old snob that Pippitt is! And what a precious crew of 'friends' he boasts of! Lumpton, who, when he was a few years younger, danced the skirt-dance in women's clothes for forty pounds a night at a New York restaurant!--Mawdenham, who pawned all his mother's jewels to pay his losses at Bridge--and Lady Elizabeth Messing, who is such an abandoned old creature that her own married daughters won't know her! Oh, dear! And I believe the Knighted Bone- Boiler thinks they are quite good style! That literary man, Longford, was a most unprepossessing looking object,--a friend of Roxmouth's too, which makes him all the more unpleasant. And of course he will at once write off and say he has seen me. And then-- and then-dear me! I wonder where Sir Morton picks these people up! He doesn't like the parson here evidently--'a pretentious University prig and upstart'--what a strong way of putting it!--very strong for such a clean-looking old man! 'A pretentious University prig and upstart' are you, Mr. Walden!" Here, smiling to herself, she moved out into the garden and called her dog to her side--"Do you hear that, Plato? Our next-door neighbour is a prig as well as a parson!- -isn't it dreadful!" Plato looked up at her with great loving brown eyes and wagged his plumy tail. "I believe he is,--and yet--yet all the same, I think--yes!--I think, as soon as a convenient opportunity presents itself, I'll ask him to dinner."