iliation that might be proposed.

The meeting did not happen until the Monday, when Gwendolen went to the
rectory with her mamma. They had called at Sawyer's Cottage by the way,
and had seen every cranny of the narrow rooms in a mid-day light,
unsoftened by blinds and curtains; for the furnishing to be done by
gleanings from the rectory had not yet begun.

"How _shall_ you endure it, mamma?" said Gwendolen, as they walked
away. She had not opened her lips while they were looking round at the
bare walls and floors, and the little garden with the cabbage-stalks,
and the yew arbor all dust and cobwebs within. "You and the four girls
all in that closet of a room, with the green and yellow paper pressing
on your eyes? And without me?"

"It will be some comfort that you have not to bear it too, dear."

"If it were not that I must get some money, I would rather be there
than go to be a governess."

"Don't set yourself against it beforehand, Gwendolen. If you go to the
palace you will have every luxury about you. And you know how much you
have always cared for that. You will not find it so hard as going up
and down those steep narrow stairs, and hearing the crockery rattle
through the house, and the dear girls talking."

"It is like a bad dream," said Gwendolen, impetuously. "I cannot
believe that my uncle will let you go to such a place. He ought to have
taken some other steps."

"Don't be unreasonable, dear child. What could he have done?"

"That was for him to find out. It seems to me a very extraordinary
world if people in our position must sink in this way all at once,"
said Gwendolen, the other worlds with which she was conversant being
constructed with a sense of fitness that arranged her own future
agreeably.

It was her temper that framed her sentences under this entirely new
pressure of evils: she could have spoken more suitably on the
vicissitudes in other people's lives, though it was never her
aspiration to express herself virtuously so much as cleverly--a point
to be remembered in extenuation of her words, which were usually worse
than she was.

And, notwithstanding the keen sense of her own bruises, she was capable
of some compunction when her uncle and aunt received her with a more
affectionate kindness than they had ever shown before. She could not
but be struck by the dignified cheerfulness with which they talked of
the necessary economies in their way of living, and in the education of
the boys.