The Palliser Novels by Anthony Trollope

was not perceptibly bigger than those to the right and left of her. Her ambition in this and in other similar matters would have amused Kate greatly had she been a bystander, and not one of her aunt’s party. Mrs Greenow was good-natured, liberal, and not by nature selfish; but she was determined not to waste the good things which fortune had given, and desired that all the world should see that she had forty thousand pounds of her own. And in doing this she was repressed by no feeling of false shame. She never hesitated in her demands through bashfulness. She called aloud for such comfort and grandeur as Yarmouth could afford her, and was well pleased that all around should hear her calling. Joined to all this was her uncontrolled grief for her husband’s death.
    “Dear Greenow! sweet lamb! Oh, Kate, if you’d only known that man!” When she said this she was sitting in the best of Mrs Jones’s sitting-rooms, waiting to have dinner announced. She had taken a drawing-room and dining-room, “because,” as she had said, “she didn’t see why people should be stuffy when they went to the seaside; — not if they had means to make themselves comfortable.”
    “Oh, Kate, I do wish you’d known him!”
    “I wish I had,” said Kate, — very untruly. “I was unfortunately away when he went to Vavasor Hall.”
    “Ah, yes; but it was at home, in the domestic circle, that Greenow should have been seen to be appreciated. I was a happy woman, Kate, while that lasted.” And Kate was surprised to see that real tears — one or two on each side — were making their way down her aunt’s cheeks. But they were soon checked with a handkerchief of the broadest hem and of the finest cambric.
    “Dinner, ma’am,” said Jeannette, opening the door.
    “Jeannette, I told you always to say that dinner was served.”
    “Dinner’s served then,” said Jeannette in a tone of anger.
    “Come, Kate,” said her aunt. “I’ve but little appetite myself, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t eat your dinner. I specially wrote to Mrs Jones to have some sweetbread. I do hope she’s got a decent cook. It’s very little I eat myself, but I do like to see things nice.”
    The next day was Sunday; and it was beautiful to see how Mrs Greenow went to church in all the glory of widowhood. There had been a great unpacking after that banquet on the sweetbread, and all her funereal millinery had been displayed before Kate’s wondering eyes. The charm of the woman was in this, — that she was not in the least ashamed of anything that she did. She turned over all her wardrobe of mourning, showing the richness of each article, the stiffness of the crape, the fineness of the cambric, the breadth of the frills, — telling the price of each to a shilling, while she explained how the whole had been amassed without any consideration of expense. This she did with all the pride of a young bride when she shows the glories of her trousseau to the friend of her bosom. Jeannette stood by the while, removing one thing and exhibiting another. Now and again through the performance, Mrs Greenow would rest a while from her employment, and address the shade of the departed one in terms of most endearing affection. In the midst of this Mrs Jones came in; but the widow was not a whit abashed by the presence of the stranger. “Peace be to his manes!” she said at last, as she carefully folded up a huge black crape mantilla. She made, however, but one syllable of the classical word, and Mrs Jones thought that her lodger had addressed herself to the mortal “remains” of her deceased lord.
    “He is left her uncommon well off, I suppose,” said Mrs Jones to Jeannette.
    “You may say that, ma’am. It’s more nor a hundred thousand of pounds!”
    “No!”
    “Pounds of sterling, ma’am! Indeed it is; — to my knowledge.”
    “Why don’t she have a carriage?”
    “So she do; — but a lady can’t bring her carriage down to the sea when she’s only