r oration, tending to show that it was
positively wicked to talk like that. There wasn't a girl in England who
had more done for her. He himself spent his days and nights chiefly in
thinking what he could do for the happiness of his children, and the
same might be said of their mother. He enumerated the blessings Cicely
enjoyed, amongst which the amount of money spent upon keeping up a place
like Kencote bulked largely. When he had gone over the field a second
time, and picked up the gleanings left over from his sheaves of oratory,
he asked her, apparently as a matter of kindly curiosity, what she had
to grumble about.

She told him dispiritedly, leaving him time after each item of her
discontent to put her in the wrong.

Item: She had nothing to do at home.

He said amongst other things that he had in that very room a manuscript
volume compiled by her great-great-grandmother full of receipts and so
forth, which he intended to get published some day to show what women
could do in a house if they really did what they ought.

Item: She hadn't been properly educated.

That was wicked nonsense, and he wondered at a daughter of his talking
such trash. In the course of further remarks he said that when all the
girls in the board schools could play the piano and none of them could
cook, he supposed the Radicals would be satisfied.

Item: There were a great many horses in the stable and she was not
allowed to ride one of them.

Did she think she had gone the right way to work to have horses given
her, bolting out of the house without a with your leave or a by your
leave, etc.? Had her six great-aunts ever wanted horses to ride? Hunting
he would not have. He might be old-fashioned, he dared say he was, but
to see a woman tearing about the country, etc.----! But if she had come
to him properly, and it had been otherwise convenient, he gave her to
understand that a horse might have been found for her at any time. He
did not say that one would be found for her _now_.

Item: She never went anywhere.

A treatise on gadding about, with sub-sections devoted to the state of
drains in foreign cities, the game of Bridge, as played in country
houses, and the overcrowded state of the Probate and Divorce Court.

Item: She never saw anybody interesting.

A flat denial, and in the course of its expansion a sentence that
brought the blood to Cicely's face and left her pale and terrified.
"Why, only the other day," said the Squire,