Their relation
however would certainly have been nothing such, so different were
the two, had it not been that Joan had no other acquaintance of her
own age, and that Miss Jermyn had reasons for laying herself out to
please her--the principal of which was that her brother, a man
about thirty, had a great admiration for Lady Joan, and to please
him his sister would do almost anything. Their father also favoured
his son's ambition, for he hated the earl, and would be glad of his
annoyance, while he liked Lady Joan, and was far from blind to the
consequence his family would gain by such an alliance. But he had
no great hope, for experience, of which few have more than a
country doctor, had taught him that, in every probability, his
son's first advance would be for Lady Joan the signal to retire
within the palisades of her rank; for there are who will show any
amount of familiarity and friendliness with agreeable inferiors up
to the moment when the least desire of a nearer approach manifests
itself: that moment the old Adam, or perhaps rather the old Satan,
is up in full pride like a spiritual turkey-cock, with swollen
neck, roused feathers, and hideous gabble. His experience however
did not bring to his mind in the company of this reflection the
fact that such a reception was precisely that which he had himself
given to a prayer for the hand of his daughter from one whom he
counted her social inferior.
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