ality. It always seemed to him that he had
met so many other ladies like her. He felt that her undoubtable quality
had a non-individual flavour, as if standing for her class. She thought
that standing for herself was not the thing; yet she was full of
character. Tall, with nose a trifle beaked, long, sloping chin, and
an assured, benevolent mouth, showing, perhaps, too many teeth--though
thin, she was not unsubstantial. Her accent in speaking showed her
heritage; it was a kind of drawl which disregarded vulgar merits such as
tone; leaned on some syllables, and despised the final 'g'--the peculiar
accent, in fact, of aristocracy, adding its deliberate joys to life.

Shelton knew that she had many interests; she was never really idle,
from the time (7 A.M.) when her maid brought her a little china pot of
tea with a single biscuit and her pet dog, Tops, till eleven o'clock at
night, when she lighted a wax candle in a silver candlestick, and with
this in one hand, and in the other a new novel, or, better still, one of
those charming volumes written by great people about the still greater
people they have met, she said good-night to her children and her
guests. No! What with photography, the presidency of a local league,
visiting the rich, superintending all the poor, gardening, reading,
keeping all her ideas so tidy that no foreign notions might stray in,
she was never idle. The information she collected from these sources was
both vast and varied, but she never let it flavour her opinions, which
lacked sauce, and were drawn from some sort of dish into which, with all
her class, she dipped her fingers.

He liked her. No one could help liking her. She was kind, and of such
good quality, with a suggestion about her of thin, excellent, and useful
china; and she was scented, too--not with verbena, violets, or those
essences which women love, but with nothing, as if she had taken stand
against all meretricity. In her intercourse with persons not "quite the
thing" (she excepted the vicar from this category, though his father had
dealt in haberdashery), her refinement, gently, unobtrusively, and with
great practical good sense, seemed continually to murmur, "I am, and
you--well, are you, don't you know?" But there was no self-consciousness
about this attitude, for she was really not a common woman. She simply
could not help it; all her people had done this. Their nurses breathed
above them in their cradles something that, inhaled