Page:Eliot - Felix Holt, the Radical, vol. I, 1866.djvu/190

180 group in the stables, and the coachman, perhaps the most innocent member of the establishment, tippling in majestic solitude by a fire in the harness room. For Sir Maximus, as every one said, was a gentleman of the right sort, condescended to no mean inquiries, greeted his head-servants with a "good evening, gentlemen," when he met them in the Park, and only snarled in a subdued way when he looked over the accounts, willing to endure some personal inconvenience in order to keep up the institutions of the country, to maintain his hereditary establishment, and do his duty in that station of life—the station of the long-tailed saurian—to which it had pleased Providence to call him.

The focus of brilliancy at Treby Manor that evening was in no way the dining-room, where Sir Maximus sipped his port under some mental depression, as he discussed with his brother, the Keverend Augustus, the sad fact, that one of the oldest names in the county was to be on the wrong side—not in the drawing-room, where Miss Debarry and Miss Selina, quietly elegant in their dress and manners, were feeling rather dull than otherwise, having finished Mr Bulwer's 'Eugene Aram,' and being thrown back on the last great prose work of