Sink or Swim? , Volume III

"I really am at a loss to make up my mind which is the most extraordinary -- the man behaving in this way without encouragement, or your being so lost to everything that is -- ahem! -- due to your position in life as to allow him to think, to hope, that his proposals -- _most_ impertinent ones, I must say -- _could_ meet with anything but anger and contempt."

Lady Millicent was seated on her presidential sofa, in the room appropriated in Bolton-square to her especial use. It was a dull, dark, business-looking apartment. The "third drawing-room" it was called, and in it milady was wont to receive such visitors as clearly were not there for purposes of mere pleasure, or with the intention of ephemerally enjoying themselves -- men of law, serious men, with faces fraught with the care that the craving after six-and-eightpences is wont to impress on the human countenance divine, were seen entering, clearly with a purpose, the heavy door (white-painted and gilt, but shabby and tarnished now) that led to milady's sanctum. It was a room into which her young daughters rarely intruded; and when, on the morning in question (it was that of the very day which Honor passed so feverishly with Arthur Vavasour by her side), Rhoda, poor, timid, nervous Rhoda, was summoned to an audience with her awe-inspiring mamma, she made her _entrée_ with a beating heart, and, though she knew not wherefore, with a strong presentment of evil. The open letter in Lady Millicent's hand was scarcely evidence enough to awaken in her mind anything at all approaching to the truth. Rhoda was as far as the poles from imagining that the sedate rector of Switcham, the quiet, unpretending young man, whose "duties" ever seemed so much above his pleasures, could have so far allowed his mundane feelings, his passions, that were of the "earth, earthy," to overpower his well-regulated mind, as to induce him to offer to the great lady of Gillingham -- the patroness of his living, and one with whom he knew himself to be _not_ a favourite -- his humble proposals for her daughter's hand.