One staggers sometimes before the public summing-up of the amount of their fortunes.

These people who have neither blood nor rank, these men who labour in their business offices, are richer than our great dukes, at the realising of whose wealth and possessions we have at times almost turned pale.
"Them!" chaffed a costermonger over his barrow.

"Blimme, if some o' them blokes won't buy Buckin'am Pallis an' the 'ole R'yal Fambly some mornin' when they're out shoppin'." The subservient attendants in more than one fashionable shop Betty and her sister visit, know that Miss Vanderpoel is of the circle, though her father has not as yet bought or hired any great estate, and his daughter has not been seen in London.
"Its queer we've never heard of her being presented," one shopgirl says to another.

"Just you look at her." She evidently knows what her ladyship ought to buy--what can be trusted not to overpower her faded fragility.

The saleswomen, even if they had not been devoured by alert curiosity, could not have avoided seeing that her ladyship did not seem to know what should be bought, and that Miss Vanderpoel did, though she did not direct her sister's selection, but merely seemed to suggest with delicate restraint.