r work, she began
to plan how the offensive bouquets might be covered with a pinafore of
linen, which looked very cool and nice in summer-time. And then the
Rector's wife reflected that in winter a floor covered with white
looked chilly, and that a woollen drugget of an appropriate small
pattern would be better on the whole; but no such thing was to be had
without going to London for it, which brought her mind back again to
Mr Leeson and all the disadvantages of Carlingford. These subjects
occupied Mrs Morgan to the exclusion of external matters, as was
natural; and when she heard the gentlemen stir down-stairs as if with
ideas of joining her in the drawing-room, the Rector's wife suddenly
recollected that she had promised some tea to a poor woman in Grove
Street, and that she could not do better this beautiful evening than
take it in her own person. She was very active in her district at all
times, and had proved herself an admirable clergywoman; but perhaps it
would not have occurred to her to go out upon a charitable errand that
particular evening had it not been for the presence of Mr Leeson
down-stairs.

It was such a very lovely night, that Mrs Morgan was tempted to go
further than she intended. She called on two or three of her
favourites in Grove Street, and was almost as friendly with them as
Lucy Wodehouse was with the people in Prickett's Lane; but being
neither pretty and young, like Lucy, nor yet a mother with a nursery,
qualified to talk about the measles, her reception was not quite as
enthusiastic as it might have been. Somehow it would appear as though
our poor neighbours loved most the ministrations of youth, which is
superior to all ranks in the matter of possibility and expectation,
and inferior to all ranks in the matter of experience; and so holds a
kind of balance and poise of nature between the small and the great.
Mrs Morgan was vaguely sensible of her disadvantages in this respect
as well as in others. She never could help imagining what she might
have been had she married ten years before at the natural period.
"And even then not a girl," she said to herself in her sensible way,
as she carried this habitual thread of thought with her along the
street, past the little front gardens, where there were so many
mothers with their children. On the other side of the way the genteel
houses frowned darkly with their staircase windows upon the humility
of Grove Street; and Mrs Morgan began to think wit