Elsmere. She could not away with it, and as soon as she had sufficiently
lost her first awe of her daughter-in-law she would revenge herself in
all sorts of droll ways, and with occasional flashes of petulant Irish
wit which would make Catherine colour and draw back. Then Mrs. Elsmere,
touched with remorse, would catch her by the neck and give her a
resounding kiss, which perhaps puzzled Catherine no less than her
sarcasm of a minute before.

Moreover Mrs. Elsmere felt ruefully from the first that her new daughter
was decidedly deficient in the sense of humour.

'I believe it's that father of hers,' she would say to herself crossly.
'By what Robert tells me of him he must have been one of the people who
get ill in their minds for want of a good mouth-filling laugh now and
then. The man who can't amuse himself a bit out of the world is sure to
get his head addled somehow, poor creature.'

Certainly it needed a faculty of laughter to be always able to take Mrs.
Elsmere on the right side. For instance, Catherine was more often
scandalised than impressed by her mother-in-law's charitable
performances.

Mrs. Elsmere's little cottage was filled with workhouse orphans sent to
her from different London districts. The training of these girls was the
chief business of her life, and a very odd training it was, conducted in
the noisiest way and on the most familiar terms. It was undeniable that
the girls generally did well, and they invariably adored Mrs. Elsmere,
but Catherine did not much like to think about them. Their household
teaching under Mrs. Elsmere and her old servant Martha--as great an
original as herself--was so irregular, their religious training so
extraordinary, the clothes in which they were allowed to disport
themselves so scandalous to the sober taste of the rector's wife, that
Catherine involuntarily regarded the little cottage on the hill as a
spot of misrule in the general order of the parish. She would go in,
say, at eleven o'clock in the morning, find her mother-in-law in bed,
half-dressed, with all her handmaidens about her, giving her orders,
reading her letters and the newspaper, cutting out her girls' frocks,
instructing them in the fashions, or delivering little homilies on
questions suggested by the news of the day to the more intelligent of
them. The room, the whole house, would seem to Catherine in a detestable
litter. If so, Mrs. Elsmere never apologised for it. On the contrary, as
she saw Cath