Page:Hope--Sophy of Kravonia.djvu/49

FATE'S WAY, OR LADY MEG'S the word—was a more notable person. Lady Meg—the world generally, and Sophy always, spoke of her by that style, and we may take the same liberty—was only child of the great Earl of Dunstanbury. The title and estates passed to his grandnephew, but half a million or so of money came to her. She took the money, but vowed, with an outspoken thankfulness, that from the Dunstanbury family she had taken nothing else. If the boast were true, there must have been a powerful strain of eccentricity and perversity derived] from elsewhere. All the Dunstanbury blood was Whig; Lady Meg counted the country ruined in 1688. Every Dunstanbury had been a man of sensibility; Lady Meg declared war on emotion—especially on the greatest of all emotions. The Dunstanbury attitude in thought had always been free, even tending to the materialistic; Lady Meg would believe in anything—so long as she couldn't see it. A queer woman, choosing to go to war with the world and infinitely enjoying the gratuitous conflict which she had herself provoked! With half a million pounds and the Duddington blood one can afford these recondite—luxuries and to have a Pindar and a Pikes before whom to exhibit their rare flavor. She was aggressive, capricious, hard to live with. Fancies instead of purposes, whims instead of interests, and not, as it seems, much affection for anybody—she makes rather a melancholy picture; but in her time she made a bit of a figure, too.

The air of the household was stormy that day at Morpingham—an incentive to the expedition, not a deterrent, for Lady Meg, had she known it. Sophy was in sore disgrace—accused, tried, and convicted of insubordination and unseemly demeanor towards Mrs. Smilker. The truth seems to be that this good 31