news of Mrs
Proudie's death, but there were some who felt that a trouble had
fallen on them.

Tidings of the catastrophe reached Hiram's Hospital on the evening of
its occurrence,--Hiram's Hospital, where dwelt Mr. and Mrs. Quiverful
with all their children. Now Mrs. Quiverful owed a debt of gratitude
to Mrs. Proudie, having been placed in her present comfortable home by
that lady's patronage. Mrs. Quiverful perhaps understood the character
of the deceased woman, and expressed her opinion respecting it, as
graphically did any one in Barchester. There was the natural surprise
felt at the Warden's Lodge in the Hospital when the tidings were
first received there, and the Quiverful family was at first too
full of dismay, regrets, and surmises to be able to give themselves
impartially to criticism. But on the following morning, conversation
at the breakfast-table naturally referring to the great loss which
the bishop had sustained, Mrs. Quiverful thus pronounced her opinion
of her friend's character: "You'll find that he'll feel it, Q," she
said to her husband, in answer to some sarcastic remark made by him
as to the removal of the thorn. "He'll feel it, though she was almost
too many for him while she was alive."

"I daresay he'll feel it at first," said Quiverful; "but I think
he'll be more comfortable than he has been."

"Of course he'll feel it, and go on feeling it till he dies, if he's
the man I take him to be. You're not to think that there has been no
love because there used to be some words, that he'll find himself the
happier because he can do things more as he pleases. She was a great
help to him, and he must have known that she was, in spite of the
sharpness of her tongue. No doubt her tongue was sharp. No doubt she
was sharp. No doubt she was upsetting. And she could make herself a
fool too in her struggles to have everything her own way. But, Q,
there were worse women than Mrs. Proudie. She was never one of your
idle ones, and I'm quite sure that no man or woman ever heard her say
a word against her husband behind his back."

"All the same, she gave him a terribly bad life of it, if all is true
that we hear."

"There are men who must have what you call a terribly bad life of
it, whatever way it goes with them. The bishop is weak, and he wants
somebody near him to be strong. She was strong,--perhaps too strong;
but he had his advantage out of it. After all I don't know that his
life has been so terribly b