"I was told that I was free to arrange these things!"

"Free!" said Raymond, thoroughly roused; "free to write notes, and
order the carriage, and play lady of the house; but did you think
that made you free to bring an American mountebank of a woman to
hold forth absurd trash in my mother's own drawing-room, as soon as
my back was turned?"

"I should have done the same had you been there."

"Indeed!" ironically; "I did not know how far you had graduated in
the Rights of Women. So you invited these people?"

"Then the whole host of children was poured in on us, and everything
imaginable done to interrupt, and render everything rational
impossible. I know it was Rosamond's contrivance, she looked so
triumphant, dressed in an absurd fancy dress, and her whole train
doing nothing but turning me into ridicule, and Mrs. Tallboys too.
Whatever you choose to call her, you cannot approve of a stranger
and foreigner being insulted here. It is that about which I care--
not myself; I have seen none of them since, nor shall I do so until
a full apology has been made to my guest and to myself."

"You have not told me the offence."

"In the first place, there was an absurd form of Christmas-tree, to
which one was dragged blindfold, and sedulously made ridiculous; and
I--I had a dust-pan and brush. Yes, I had, in mockery of our
endeavours to purify that unhappy street."