t music for all hunting purposes; moreover, he had
come to his property, as was well known through all Barsetshire, with
a clear income of fourteen thousand a year.

Thus, when some old worn-out master of hounds was run to ground,
about a year after Mr Gresham's last contest for the county, it
seemed to all parties to be a pleasant and rational arrangement that
the hounds should go to Greshamsbury. Pleasant, indeed, to all except
the Lady Arabella; and rational, perhaps, to all except the squire
himself.

All this time he was already considerably encumbered. He had spent
much more than he should have done, and so indeed had his wife, in
those two splendid years in which they had figured as great among the
great ones of the earth. Fourteen thousand a year ought to have been
enough to allow a member of Parliament with a young wife and two or
three children to live in London and keep up their country family
mansion; but then the de Courcys were very great people, and Lady
Arabella chose to live as she had been accustomed to do, and as her
sister-in-law the countess lived: now Lord de Courcy had much more
than fourteen thousand a year. Then came the three elections, with
their vast attendant cost, and then those costly expedients to which
gentlemen are forced to have recourse who have lived beyond their
income, and find it impossible so to reduce their establishments as
to live much below it. Thus when the hounds came to Greshamsbury, Mr
Gresham was already a poor man.

Lady Arabella said much to oppose their coming; but Lady Arabella,
though it could hardly be said of her that she was under her
husband's rule, certainly was not entitled to boast that she had him
under hers. She then made her first grand attack as to the furniture
in Portman Square; and was then for the first time specially informed
that the furniture there was not matter of much importance, as she
would not in future be required to move her family to that residence
during the London seasons. The sort of conversations which grew from
such a commencement may be imagined. Had Lady Arabella worried her
lord less, he might perhaps have considered with more coolness the
folly of encountering so prodigious an increase to the expense of his
establishment; had he not spent so much money in a pursuit which his
wife did not enjoy, she might perhaps have been more sparing in her
rebukes as to his indifference to her London pleasures. As it was,
the hounds came to