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He entered the drawing-room which ran the whole depth of the house, from the square to the garden behind, with three tall windows at each end and a chimney-piece of pale veined marble that the East India merchant’s excellent taste had left entirely alone.

Marianne walked the length of the room on the first afternoon with her hands clasped behind her, in the assessing manner of a woman planning a campaign. “It is a beautiful room, Henry, and it has been treated exactly as a beautiful room ought never to be treated, which is to say, left entirely alone. There is not a flower in it. There is not a cushion outside of its proper square. I do not believe a single person has laughed in this room above twice since you took possession of it.”

“I have laughed in it,” said Henry, with dignity.

“At your accounts, I have no doubt, which does not count in the least.”

“At your letter, actually,” corrected Henry, with a smirk.

Marianne smiled and shook her head. “In the words of your dear Aunt, you are an impertinent boy.”

“Mamma, you wound me!” he cried. “Impertinent man would be more accurate.”

His mother and aunt exchanged smiles and shook their heads.

Marianne continued, “We shall have it put right within the week. Elinor, you have an eye for these things; I have none whatever, as you know, and shall only want to fill every table with flowers until the poor footmen cannot find their way across the room.”

“That,” said Elinor, “sounds a very great improvement upon the present arrangement.”

Dinner that first evening was a cheerful, somewhat disordered affair, eaten at a table capable of seating twelve but tonight filled with much more noise from a comfortable, happy family of eight. It was remarked upon that the house seemed to have been waiting for exactly this sort of noise, in the same way that a room left long unlit seems to have been waiting for a candle.

“I do not know how you bore it without us, Henry,” said Ned, applying himself to a second helping of the fish with the particular single-minded devotion of a young man of fifteen who had not yet finished growing. “Alone, in a whole house, entirely to yourself, and nobody to tell you when to come to dinner. I should have gone distracted within the fortnight.”

“I only stayed here for a fortnight, and I had a great deal of work to occupy me.”

“You had a great deal of work,” said Marianne, from across the table, with the particular dry affection she reserved for teasing him, “because you arranged your life very carefully so as to have a great deal of work, and no time whatever left over in which to notice how quiet the house was. I have known you to do it before, Henry. You did it for two years at Fernley before this house ever came into the question.”

“I do not think that is entirely fair.”

“I do not think it is entirely unfair, either,” said Elinor, mildly, passing the bread, “and I think we have all of us agreed, by unspoken family consent, not to pursue the subject at the dinner table, so I shall content myself with observing that the house looks a great deal better full than empty, and leave the rest of it for another evening.”

The Colonel, at the foot of the table, said little, after his usual fashion, but was observed to look about him, at the crowded table and the candlelight and the general happy confusion of a large family settling itself into a house too long kept quiet, with an expression of very simple contentment; and it was Sarah, catching his eye across the length of the table, who smiled at him in a manner that made him think, not for the first time that evening, that he had a very great deal to be thankful for.

“I only hope,” said Anne, from her place beside her mother, with the practical anxiety of a girl two months from her own first ball, “that we are not to spend the whole of March at dinner. There is a great deal to be done before May, and I have heard nothing yet of gowns, or fabrics, or anything whatever that signifies.”

“You need not fear on that account,” said Marianne. “We are promised at Portman Square the day after tomorrow, expressly for the purpose, and I do not think Cecilia will let the subject rest for one moment longer than that.”

Cecilia was as good as her word, and rather better; for when the ladies of Berkeley Square were shown into the drawing-room at Portman Square two mornings later, they found the whole apparatus of a Season already half assembled — pattern-books stacked upon the sofa, a length of silver-grey silk draped experimentally across the back of a chair, and Cecilia herself in the middle of it all, radiant, a little stouter than she had been at her own coming-out, and entirely unchanged in the essential particulars.

“You have come at last,” she cried, embracing Marianne and then Elinor and then, with especial warmth, Sarah and Anne together, as though she could not decide which of them she was more delighted to see brought out at last. “I have had the pattern-books sent round since Tuesday, and Margaret has been of no use to me whatever, for she will look at a length of the most exquisite Bath silk and ask me whether I have considered its qualities as a wrapping for delicate specimens, which I have told her is not at all the spirit in which one ought to approach a ball gown.”

“It would answer the purpose excellently,” said Margaret, from the window-seat, entirely unrepentant, “and I do not see why a thing may not be beautiful and useful both.”

Mrs. Dashwood sitting happily in the most comfortable chair in the room added, “But I have overruled her, and told her she should content herself with admiring the colours instead. I told her that is the whole of what is required of her.”

It was in the midst of this comfortable confusion that a small, fair-haired, young person of twelve came into the room, with a book under one arm and an expression of polite and youthful interest, and was presented, with great ceremony, as Miss Margaret Wren, called Meg, who had been permitted to leave her lessons early upon the solemn understanding that she would sit quietly and not disarrange the silks.

“You are grown so tall, Meg,” said Marianne, drawing the girl to her with real affection. “I remember you scowling at the whole of Portman Square from your cradle, and here you are, quite grown, and looking, I think, very like your papa about the eyes.”

“I am also told I have Papa’s temper and Mamma’s stubbornness,” said Meg, with the particular grave precision of a child who has clearly had the observation made to her more than once and has given it due consideration, “which Grandmamma says is a very unfortunate combination, and Grandpapa says accounts for everything interesting about me.”

“Your grandfather,” said Elinor, “has a great deal of experience in the interesting combinations of temper and stubbornness, and I think we may safely take his word for it.”

Meg was permitted to sit in the window-seat with her book, and to look up, at intervals, with evident interest, at the proceedings; and the room settled, by degrees, into the serious business of the morning, which was nothing less than the entire wardrobe two young ladies would require to be brought properly into society.

“You will each want a ball gown for Lady Ardleigh’s, to begin with,” said Cecilia, counting the items off upon her fingers with the brisk authority of a woman who had once organised an excavation and found a London Season, upon the whole, a good deal simpler to manage. “That is the first necessity, and the one I mean to see done properly.”

“Beyond that,” Mrs. Dashwood added, “you will each want at least three day dresses, for calling, and for the Park, and for the general business of being seen; a walking-dress apiece, and a spencer to go over it, for March has no intention of growing warm before it is ready.”