This being so,
he tolerated her, treating her with a kind of cold politeness, which might
have been tolerably natural in some guardian burdened with the charge of
a ward he did not care for. They rarely met until dinner-time, Clarissa
taking her breakfast about three hours before her father left his room. But
at seven they dined together, and spent the long winter evenings in each
other's company, Clarissa being sometimes permitted to read aloud in German
or Italian, while her father lay back in his easy-chair, smoking his
meerschaum, and taking the amber mouthpiece from his lips now and then to
correct an accent or murmur a criticism on the text. Sometimes, too, Mr.
Lovel would graciously expound a page or two of a Greek play, or dilate on
the subtilty of some learned foot-note, for his daughter's benefit, but
rather with the air of one gentleman at his club inviting the sympathy of
another gentleman than with the tone of a father instructing his child.
Sometimes, but very rarely, they had company. Mr. Oliver and his wife would
dine with them occasionally, or the Vicar of Arden, a grave bachelor of
five-and-thirty, would drop in to spend an hour or two of an evening. But
besides these they saw scarcely any one. The small professional men of
Holborough Mr. Lovel held in supreme contempt, a contempt of which those
gentlemen themselves were thoroughly aware; the country people whom he had
been accustomed to receive at Arden Court he shrank from with a secret
sense of shame, in these days of his fallen fortunes.
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