She had taken a large rambling
house, which had been usually considered to confer a patent of
gentility upon its tenant, because, once upon a time, seventy or
eighty years before, the spinster daughter of an earl had resided
in it. I am not sure if the inhabiting this house was not also
believed to convey some unusual power of intellect; for the earl's
daughter, Lady Jane, had a sister, Lady Anne, who had married a
general officer in the time of the American war, and this general
officer had written one or two comedies, which were still acted on
the London boards, and which, when we saw them advertised, made us
all draw up, and feel that Drury Lane was paying a very pretty
compliment to Cranford. Still, it was not at all a settled thing
that Mrs Fitz-Adam was to be visited, when dear Miss Jenkyns died;
and, with her, something of the clear knowledge of the strict code
of gentility went out too. As Miss Pole observed, "As most of the
ladies of good family in Cranford were elderly spinsters, or widows
without children, if we did not relax a little, and become less
exclusive, by-and-by we should have no society at all."
Mrs Forrester continued on the same side.
"She had always understood that Fitz meant something aristocratic;
there was Fitz-Roy--she thought that some of the King's children
had been called Fitz-Roy; and there was Fitz-Clarence, now--they
were the children of dear good King William the Fourth.
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