even noticed. He had
felt when he first entered the little drawing-room of the cottage that
Mrs. Goddard herself belonged, or had belonged, to that delicious unknown
world of ease where the question of expense was never considered, much
less mentioned. In her own eyes she was indeed living in a state
approaching to penury, but the spectacle of her pictures, her furniture
and her bibelots had impressed John with a very different idea. The
squire's invitation, asking him to spend a week at the Hall, seemed in a
moment to put him upon the same level as the woman to whom he believed
himself so devotedly attached. To his mind the ideal woman could not but
be surrounded by a luxurious atmosphere of her own. To enter the charmed
precincts of those surroundings seemed to John equivalent to being
transported from the regions of the Theocritan to the level of the
Anacreontic ode, from the pastoral, of which he had had too much, to the
aristocratic, of which he felt that he could not have enough. It was a
natural feeling in a very young man of his limited experience.

He stayed some hours at the vicarage. Both Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose thought
him changed in the short time which had elapsed since they had seen him.
He had grown more grave; he was certainly more of a man. The great
contest he had just sustained with so much honour had left upon his young
face its mark, an air of power which had not formerly been visible there;
even his voice seemed to have grown deeper and rounder, and his words
carried more weight. The good vicar, who had seen several generations
of students, already distinguished in John Short the budding "don," and
rubbed his hands with great satisfaction.

John asked few questions but found himself obliged to answer many
concerning his recent efforts. He would have liked to say something about
Mrs. Goddard, but he remembered with some awe and much aversion the
circumstances in which he had last quitted the vicarage, and he held his
peace; whereby he again rose in Mrs. Ambrose's estimation. He made up for
his silence by speaking effusively of the squire's kindness in asking him
to the Hall; forgetting perhaps the relief he had felt when he escaped
from Billingsfield after Christmas without being again obliged to shake
hands with Mr. Juxon. Things looked very differently now, however. He
felt himself to be somebody in the world, and that distressing sense of
inferiority which had perhaps been at the root of his jealo