m so. My entrance partially aroused him from a brown study. (He was at
all times very "absent") He rose, said grace aloud for the benefit of
the company--which had dispersed--and withdrew to his library. But we
abolished this uncivilized custom in conclave, and thenceforth sat our
meals out to the end.

So free were we in our isolation upon those Yorkshire moors from the
trammels of conventionality (one might almost say, civilization!), that
I think we should have come to begrudge the ordinary interchange of the
neighbourly courtesies of life, but for occasional lectures from Mrs.
Arkwright, and for going out visiting from time to time.

It was not merely that a life of running in and out of other people's
houses, and chatting the same bits of news threadbare with one
acquaintance after another, as at Riflebury, would have been unendurable
by us. The rare arrival of a visitor from some distant country-house to
call at the Vicarage was the signal for every one, who could do so with
decency, to escape from the unwelcome interruption. But as we grew
older, Mrs. Arkwright would not allow this. The boys, indeed, were hard
to coerce; they "bolted" still when the door-bell rang; but domestic
authority, which is apt to be magnified on "the girls," overruled
Eleanor and me for our good, and her mother--who reasoned with us far
more than she commanded--convinced us of how much selfishness there was
in this, as in all acts of discourtesy.

But what do we not owe to her good counsels? In how many evening talks
has she not warned us of the follies, affectations, or troubles to which
our lives might specially be liable! Against despising interests that
are not our own, or graces which we have chosen to neglect, against the
danger of satire, against the love or the fear of being thought
singular, and, above all, against the petty pride of clique.

"I do not know which is the worst," I remember her saying, "a religious
clique, an intellectual clique, a fashionable clique, a moneyed clique,
or a family clique. And I have seen them all."

"Come, Mother," said Eleanor, "you cannot persuade us you would not have
more sympathy with the intellectual than the moneyed clique, for
instance?"

"I should have warmly declared so myself, at one time," said Mrs.
Arkwright, "but I have a vivid remembrance of a man belonging to an
artistic clique, to whose house I once went with some friends. My
friends were artists also, but their minds were en