I cannot help thinking that if there had been a lady at the rectory, this state of affairs would have been mended, and that a good mother, with her family to set out in the world, would have seen the advantage for her own children of doing her best to attract acquaintances and company to Greyshott. But the rector was only a man, and a timid one, fearing to break the bonds of convention, and his daughters were too young to take the matter into their own hands. They might have done it had Mrs. Piercey waited for a few years; but then Patty had no inclination to wait.
Mrs. Piercey went to town after Easter, as she was aware everybody who respected themselves, who were in Society, or who had any money to spend, did. But, alas! she did not know how to manage this any more than to find the usual solace in country life. She was, indeed, still more helpless in town; for no doubt in the country, if she had been patient, there would at last have been found somebody who would have had courage to break the embargo, to defy Lord and Lady Hartmore and all the partisans of the old family, and to call upon the lady of Greyshott. But in town what could Patty do? She knew nobody but the distant cousins somewhere in the depths of Islington, to whom she had gone at the time of her marriage, but whom she had taken care to forget the very existence of as soon as her need for them was over. Mrs. Piercey went to a fashionable hotel, and engaged a handsome set of rooms, and sat down and waited for happiness to come to her. She had her maid with her, the irreproachable Jerningham, who would not allow her mistress to demean herself by making a companion of her; and she had Robert, the footman, and her own coachman from Greyshott, and a new victoria in which to drive about--all the elements of happiness--poor Patty! and yet it would not come. She had permitted herself, by this time, to drop the weight of her mourning, and to blossom forth in grey and white; and she drove in the Park in the most beautiful costumes, with the old fat Greyshott horses, who were in themselves a certificate that she was somebody, no mushroom of a _parvenue_. So was the coachman, who was the real old Greyshott coachman, and (evidently) had been in the family for generations. She drove steadily every day along the sacred promenade, and was seen of everybody, and discussed among various bands of onlookers, whose only occupation, like the Athenians, was that of seeing or hearing some new thing. Who was she? That she was not of the style of her horses and her coachman was apparent at a glance. Where had she got them? Was it an attempt on the part of some visitor from the ends of the earth to pose as a lady of established family? Was it, perhaps, a daring _coup_ on the part of some person, not at all _comme il faut_, to attract the observation and curiosity of the world? Patty’s little face, with its somewhat fast prettiness, half abashed, half impudent, shone out of its surroundings with a contradiction to all those suppositions. The Person would not have been at all abashed, but wholly impudent, or else quite assured and satisfied with herself; and in any case she would not have been alone. A stranger, above all, would not have been alone. There would have been a bevy of other women with her, making merry over all the novelty about them, and this, probably, would have been the case had the other idea been correct. But who was this, with the face of a pretty housemaid and the horses of a respectable dowager? Some of the gentlemen in the park, who amused themselves with these speculations, would, no doubt, have managed to resolve their doubts on the subject had not Patty been, as much as Una, though she was so different a character, enveloped in an atmosphere of such unquestionable good behaviour and modesty as no instructed eye could mistake. Women, who are less instructed on such matters, may mistake; but not men, who have better means of knowing. Thus Patty did make a little commotion; but as she had no means of knowing of it, and no one to tell her, it did her no good in the world.