Their parents were respectable farmers,
content with their station. The name of these good people was
Hoggins. Mr Hoggins was the Cranford doctor now; we disliked the
name and considered it coarse; but, as Miss Jenkyns said, if he
changed it to Piggins it would not be much better. We had hoped to
discover a relationship between him and that Marchioness of Exeter
whose name was Molly Hoggins; but the man, careless of his own
interests, utterly ignored and denied any such relationship,
although, as dear Miss Jenkyns had said, he had a sister called
Mary, and the same Christian names were very apt to run in
families.
Soon after Miss Mary Hoggins married Mr Fitz-Adam, she disappeared
from the neighbourhood for many years. She did not move in a
sphere in Cranford society sufficiently high to make any of us care
to know what Mr Fitz-Adam was. He died and was gathered to his
fathers without our ever having thought about him at all. And then
Mrs Fitz-Adam reappeared in Cranford ("as bold as a lion," Miss
Pole said), a well-to-do widow, dressed in rustling black silk, so
soon after her husband's death that poor Miss Jenkyns was justified
in the remark she made, that "bombazine would have shown a deeper
sense of her loss."
I remember the convocation of ladies who assembled to decide
whether or not Mrs Fitz-Adam should be called upon by the old blue-
blooded inhabitants of Cranford.
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