"
Clarissa remembered the old kitchen-gardens at the Court in her father's
time, when the whole extent of "glass" was comprised by a couple of
dilapidated cucumber-frames, and a queer little greenhouse in a corner,
where she and her brother had made some primitive experiments in
horticulture, and where there was a particular race of spiders, the biggest
specimens of the spidery species it had ever been her horror to encounter.
"I wonder whether the little greenhouse is there still?" she thought. "O,
no, no; battered down to the ground, of course, by this pompous man's
order. I don't suppose I should know the dear old place, if I were to see
it now."
"You are fond of botany, I suppose, Miss Lovel?" Mr. Granger asked
presently, with a palpable effort. He was not an adept in small talk, and
though in the course of years of dinner-eating and dinner-giving he had
been frequently called upon to address his conversation to young ladies, he
never opened his lips to one of the class without a sense of constraint
and an obvious difficulty. He had all his life been most at home in men's
society, where the talk was of grave things, and was no bad talker when
the question in hand was either commercial or political. But as a rich
man cannot go through life without being cultivated more or less by the
frivolous herd, Mr. Granger had been compelled to conform himself somehow
to the requirements of civilised society, and to talk in his stiff bald way
of things which he neither understood nor cared for.
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