, being
deaf, answered in a forensic bellow, so that Addington, passing the
brick wall in its goings to and fro, heard, and communicated to those at
home that Jeffrey Blake, dear fellow, was going back to the land.
Jeffrey did, as he had cynically foreseen, become a cause. All persons
of social significance came to call, and were, without qualification,
kind. Sometimes he would not see them, but Anne one day told him how
wrong he was. If he hid himself he put a burden on his father, who stood
in the breach, and talked even animatedly, renewing old acquaintance
with a dignified assumption of having nothing to ignore. But when the
visitors were gone the red in his cheek paled something too much, and
Anne thought he was being unduly strained.

After that Jeffrey doggedly stayed by. He proved rather a silent host,
but he stood up to the occasion, and even answered the general query
whether he was going into business by the facer that he and his father
had gone into it. They were market-gardening. The visitors regretted
that, so far as Addington manners would permit, because they had
noticed the old orchard was being ploughed, and that of course meant
beans at least. Some of the older ladies recalled stories of dear Doctor
Blake's pacing up and down beside the wall. They believed you could even
find traces of the sacred path; but one day Jeffrey put an end to that
credulous ideal by saying you couldn't now anyway, since it had been
ploughed. Then, he saw, he hurt Addington and was himself disquieted.
Years ago he had been amused when he hit hard against it and they flew
apart equally banged; now he was grown up, whether to his advantage or
not, and it looked to him as if Addington ought by this time to be grown
up too.

It was another Addington altogether from the one he had left, though a
surface of old tradition and habit still remained to clothe it in a
semblance of past dignity and calm. Not a public cause existed in the
known world but Addington now had a taste of it, though no one but Miss
Amabel did much more than talk with fervour. The ladies who had once
gone delicately out to teas and church, as sufficient intercourse with
this world and preparation for the next, now had clubs and classes where
they pounced on subjects not even mentionable fifty years ago, and shook
them to shreds in their well-kept teeth. There was sprightly talk about
class-consciousness, and young women who, if their incomes had been
dissipate