received from Sir Magnus and the necessary additions were made to their
joint wardrobe.

Sir Magnus Mountjoy, the late general's elder brother, had been for the
last four or five years the English minister at Brussels. He had been
minister somewhere for a very long time, so that the memory of man
hardly ran back beyond it, and was said to have gained for himself very
extensive popularity. It had always been a point with successive
governments to see that poor Sir Magnus got something, and Sir Magnus
had never been left altogether in the cold. He was not a man who would
have been left out in the cold in silence, and perhaps the feeling that
such was the case had been as efficacious on his behalf as his
well-attested popularity. At any rate, poor Sir Magnus had always been
well placed, and was now working out his last year or two before the
blessed achievement of his pursuit should have been reached. Sir Magnus
had a wife of whom it was said at home that she was almost as popular as
her husband; but the opinion of the world at Brussels on this subject
was a good deal divided. There were those who declared that Lady
Mountjoy was of all women the most overbearing and impertinent. But they
were generally English residents at Brussels, who had come to live there
as a place at which education for their children would be cheaper than
at home. Of these Lady Mountjoy had been heard to declare that she saw
no reason why, because she was the minister's wife, she should be
expected to entertain all the second-class world of London. This, of
course, must be understood with a good deal of allowance, as the English
world at Brussels was much too large to expect to be so received; but
there were certain ladies living on the confines of high society who
thought that they had a right to be admitted, and who grievously
resented their exclusion. It cannot, therefore, be said that Lady
Mountjoy was popular; but she was large in figure, and painted well, and