Mr. Bertram set off for ——— with his striped champion-to-be, and Miss Crawford was prepared to find a great chasm in their society, and to miss him decidedly in the meetings which were now becoming almost daily between the families. On their all dining together at the Park soon after his going, she retook her chosen place near the bottom of the table, right next to the gilded and nearly life-size statue of Isis, fully expecting to feel a most melancholy difference in the change of masters.

It would be a very flat business, she was sure. In comparison with his brother, Edmund would have nothing to say. The soup would be sent round in a most spiritless manner, wine drank without any smiles or agreeable trifling, and the venison cut up without supplying one pleasant anecdote of any former haunch, or a single entertaining story, about “my friend such a one” or even the latest arrived Cairo crate on the part of Lady Bertram. She must try to find amusement in what was passing at the upper end of the table, and in observing Mr. Rushworth, who was now making his appearance at Mansfield for the first time since the Crawfords’ arrival. He had been visiting a friend in the neighbouring county, and that friend having recently had his grounds laid out by an improver. Mr. Rushworth was returned with his head full of the subject.

He was very eager to be improving his own place in the same way. He could talk of nothing else, punctuated by occasional near-howls that, no matter how beastly odd, elicited no expression of surprise from anyone present. The subject had been already handled in the palm frond-shadowed drawing-room; it was revived in the dining-parlour which was noticeably crowded due to several new long imported crates lined up in a perimeter against the walls next to the already resident oil jars from the Middle Kingdom. Miss Bertram’s attention and opinion was evidently his chief aim; and though her deportment showed rather conscious superiority than any solicitude to oblige him, the mention of Sotherton Court, and the ideas attached to it, gave her a feeling of complacency, which prevented her from being very ungracious.

“I wish you could see Compton,” said he; “it is the most complete thing! Argh! Grrowl! Ahem—I never saw a place so altered in my life. I told Smith I did not know where I was. The approach now, is one of the finest things in the country: you see the house in the most surprising manner. I declare, Ayyyy! Ahem, when I got back to Sotherton yesterday, it looked like a prison—quite a dismal old prison. Grrr! Arghrowwl!”

“Oh, for shame!” cried Mrs. Norris, ending on a bit of a nasal snarl herself. “A prison indeed? Sotherton Court is the noblest old place in the world.”