ence in regarding their
respectable women as simple reproductive agents of inferior human
quality.

"And though our well-brought-up girls shrink from the frank speech, they
do not appear to shrink from the ideas of the old Greeks. They don't
mind playing the part of cows so long as one doesn't mention it."

About eighteen months ago, the village had been full of talk and
excitement in consequence of the birth of an heir to the house of
Engleton, Lady Engleton's mission in life being frankly regarded as
unfulfilled during the previous three or four years, when she had
disappointed the hopes of the family. Hadria listened scornfully. In her
eyes, the crowning indignity of the whole affair was Lady Engleton's own
smiling acceptance of the position, and her complacent eagerness to
produce the tardy inheritor of the property and honours. This expression
of sentiment had, by some means, reached the Vicarage and created much
consternation.

Mrs. Walker asserted that it was right and Christian of the lady to
desire that which gave every one so much pleasure. "A climax of feminine
abjectness!" Hadria had exclaimed in Henriette's presence.

Miss Temperley, after endeavouring to goad her sister-in-law into the
expression of jubilant congratulations, was met by the passionate
declaration that she felt more disposed to weep than to rejoice, and
more disposed to curse than to weep.

Obviously, Miss Temperley had reason to be uneasy about her part in
bringing about her brother's marriage.

These sudden overflows of exasperated feeling had become less frequent
as time went on, but the neighbours looked askance at Mrs. Temperley.
Though a powder-magazine may not always blow up, one passes it with a
grave consciousness of vast stores of inflammable material lying
somewhere within, and who knows what spark might set the thing spouting
to the skies?

When the occasional visitors had left, life in the village settled down
to its normal level, or more accurately, to its normal flatness as
regarded general contours, and its petty inequalities in respect to
local detail. It reminded Hadria of the landscape which stretched in
quiet long lines to the low horizon, while close at hand, the ground
fussed and fretted itself into minor ups and downs of no character, but
with all the trouble of a mountain district in its complexities of slope
and hollow. Hadria suffered from a gnawing home-sickness; a longing for
the rougher, bleaker scenery