"
Mrs. Lewin talked with but little interruption for the best part of an hour
while measuring her new customer, showing her pattern-book, and exhibiting
the ready-made wares she had brought, the greater number of which Hyacinth
insisted on buying for Angela--who was horrified at the slanderous
innuendoes that dropped in casual abundance from the painted lips of the
milliner; horrified, too, that her sister could loll back in her armchair
and laugh at the woman's coarse and malignant talk.
"Indeed, sister, you are far too generous, and you have overpowered me with
gifts," she said, when the milliner had curtsied herself out of the room;
"for I fear my own income will never pay for all these costly things. Three
pounds, I think she said, was the price of the Mazarine hood alone--and
there are stockings and gloves innumerable."
"Mon Ange, while you are with me your own income is but for charities
and vails. I will have it spent for nothing else. You know how rich the
Marquise has made me--while I believe Fareham is a kind of modern Croesus,
though we do not boast of his wealth, for all that is most substantial
in his fortune comes from his mother, whose father was a great merchant
trading with Spain and the Indies, all through James's reign, and luckier
in the hunt for gold than poor Raleigh.
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