Essential Novelists - Elizabeth Gaskell. Elizabeth Gaskell

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      MRS. HALE WAS CURIOUSLY amused and interested by the idea of the Thornton dinner party. She kept wondering about the details, with something of the simplicity of a little child, who wants to have all its anticipated pleasures described beforehand. But the monotonous life led by invalids often makes them like children, inasmuch as they have neither of them any sense of proportion in events, and seem each to believe that the walls and curtains which shut in their world, and shut out everything else, must of necessity be larger than anything hidden beyond. Besides, Mrs. Hale had had her vanities as a girl; had perhaps unduly felt their mortification when she became a poor clergyman's wife;—they had been smothered and kept down; but they were not extinct; and she liked to think of seeing Margaret dressed for a party, and discussed what she should wear, with an unsettled anxiety that amused Margaret, who had been more accustomed to society in her one in Harley Street than her mother in five and twenty years of Helstone.

      'Then you think you shall wear your white silk. Are you sure it will fit? It's nearly a year since Edith was married!'

      'Oh yes, mamma! Mrs. Murray made it, and it's sure to be right; it may be a straw's breadth shorter or longer-waisted, according to my having grown fat or thin. But I don't think I've altered in the least.'

      'Hadn't you better let Dixon see it? It may have gone yellow with lying by.'

      'If you like, mamma. But if the worst comes to the worst, I've a very nice pink gauze which aunt Shaw gave me, only two or three months before Edith was married. That can't have gone yellow.'

      'No! but it may have faded.'

      'Well! then I've a green silk. I feel more as if it was the embarrassment of riches.'

      'I wish I knew what you ought to wear,' said Mrs. Hale, nervously. Margaret's manner changed instantly. 'Shall I go and put them on one after another, mamma, and then you could see which you liked best?'

      'But—yes! perhaps that will be best.'

      So off Margaret went. She was very much inclined to play some pranks when she was dressed up at such an unusual hour; to make her rich white silk balloon out into a cheese, to retreat backwards from her mother as if she were the queen; but when she found that these freaks of hers were regarded as interruptions to the serious business, and as such annoyed her mother, she became grave and sedate. What had possessed the world (her world) to fidget so about her dress, she could not understand; but that very after noon, on naming her engagement to Bessy Higgins (apropos of the servant that Mrs. Thornton had promised to inquire about), Bessy quite roused up at the intelligence.

      'Dear! and are you going to dine at Thornton's at Marlborough Mills?'

      'Yes, Bessy. Why are you so surprised?'

      'Oh, I dunno. But they visit wi' a' th' first folk in Milton.'

      'And you don't think we're quite the first folk in Milton, eh, Bessy?' Bessy's cheeks flushed a little at her thought being thus easily read.

      'Well,' said she, 'yo' see, they thinken a deal o' money here and I reckon yo've not getten much.'

      'No,' said Margaret, 'that's very true. But we are educated people, and have lived amongst educated people. Is there anything so wonderful, in our being asked out to dinner by a man who owns himself inferior to my father by coming to him to be instructed? I don't mean to blame Mr. Thornton. Few drapers' assistants, as he was once, could have made themselves what he is.'

      'But can yo' give dinners back, in yo'r small house? Thornton's house is three times as big.'