Nor did she refrain from making herself eminently disagreeable to her
stepmother.
"I should not have supposed you would so soon be tired of Arden Court," she
remarked pleasantly, during that dreary quarter of an hour after dinner
which Mr. Granger and his wife and daughter were wont to pass in the
contemplation of crystallized apricots and hothouse grapes, and the
exchange of the baldest commonplaces in the way of conversation; Perhaps
if Clarissa and her husband had been alone on such occasions that air of
ceremony might have vanished. The young wife might have drawn her chair a
little nearer her husband's, and there might have been some pleasant talk
about that inexhaustible source of wonder and delight, the baby. But with
Miss Granger always at hand, the dessert was as ceremonious as if there had
been a party of eighteen, and infinitely more dreary, lacking the cheery
clatter and buzz of company. She ate five hothouse grapes, and sipped
half a glass of claret, with as solemn an air as if she had been making a
libation to the gods.
Mr. Granger looked up from his plate when his daughter made this remark
about Arden, and glanced inquiringly at his wife, with a shadow of
displeasure in his face. Yielding and indulgent as he had been to her,
there was in his composition something of the stuff that makes a tyrant.
His wife must love the things that he loved. It would have been intolerable
to him to suppose that Mrs.
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