Sir Edward stifled a yawn. Fanny had strayed from the subject. She sped up her delivery. ‘Or could it have been the Indigent Blind?’ She had invented all this for effect, of course, and was rather pleased by how well it was going. ‘Anyway, I was just taking my bonnet off, when Mary came running down the stairs …’ After such careful rehearsal, she could not edit it now or she might lose her thread, but she did need to get it all out before he was asleep altogether. ‘And perhaps it was the way the light caught? Or just that I turned around at speed and caught myself unawares, so to speak … but, anyway. There it was! Clear as day!’

‘What exactly was where, my dear?’

‘The fact! The fact was there and irrefutable.’ She clapped her hands as if the idea actually pleased her: ‘Mary Dorothea has become … rather a beauty!’

‘Become?’ Sir Edward stretched out his legs and shuffled deeper into his chair. ‘Was she not always?’

‘Oh! Well, no.’ Fanny now worried that she had misjudged it. ‘I mean, of course, sweet.’ Though Mary had never been sweet, in Fanny’s opinion. ‘But, as for beauty, I would say that is … quite new?’

‘Good Lord!’ He jolted back upright, suddenly some distance from sleep. ‘Hmph.’ Sir Edward, when discomfited, could become a little brusque. ‘To my eyes, she was always the epitome of all that is good and pure … Perhaps, when one is father to a daughter, one simply rather presumes the presence of beauty …’

‘Ah, yes.’ Fanny had the horrible feeling she had rather spoiled things for him. ‘I am sure it is so. But now,’ she said brightly, ‘you can do more than presume. Your daughter is suddenly thought to be lovely. Without wishing to blow one’s own trumpet, I do like to think that the riding has rather helped. I hope you remember that I arranged the pony and lessons and so on? It has definitely had the desired effect on both complexion and posture.’

‘I see.’ He looked into the flames, pondered and then asked: ‘And do we want her to be’ – he circled his right hand as if it were rolling down a never-ending hill – ‘lovely, et cetera, et cetera? Is that altogether a good thing?’

Fanny spent much of her married life asking for Sir Edward’s opinion, awaiting his divine judgement on any number of matters, so that, on the rare occasions that things coincided with her own areas of expertise, she did rather enjoy it. She could even become – and did have to check this, for Sir Edward would disapprove – a little professorial in her pronouncements.