Micawber--Peter, in other words. Jock has put it right by telling him
that the translators of the Bible probably made a slip, and Mhor now
prays earnestly every night: 'Let everyone in The Rigs go to heaven,'
hoping thus to smuggle in his dear companion.

"It is an extraordinary thing, but almost the very minute you left
Priorsford things began to happen.

"I told you in the note I wrote the day you left that Bella Bathgate's
lodger had arrived and that I had seen her, but I didn't realise then
what a difference her coming would make to us. I never knew such a
friendly person; she comes in at any sort of time--after breakfast, a
few minutes before luncheon, for tea, between nine and ten at night. Did
I tell you her name is Pamela Reston, and her brother, who seems to be
ranging about India somewhere, is Lord Bidborough ('A lord-no-less,' as
Mrs. M'Cosh would say). She calls him Biddy, and seems devoted to him.

"Although she is horribly rich and an 'honourable,' and all that sort of
thing, she isn't in the least grand. She never impresses one with her
opulence as, for instance, Mrs. Duff-Whalley does. Her clothes are
beautiful, but so much a part of her personality that you never think of
them. Her pearls don't hit you in the face as most other people's do.
Because she is so unconscious of them, I suppose. I think she is lovely.
Jock says she is like a greyhound, and I know what he means--it is the
long, swift, graceful way she has of moving. She says she is forty. I
always thought forty was quite old, but now it seems to me the very
prettiest age. Age doesn't really matter at all to people who have got
faces and figures and manners like Pamela Reston. They will always make
whatever age they are seem the perfect age.