ndows when they came to call, and, if
they saw any one inside, entered straightway by the same, making retreat
impossible.

The Miss Pratts had been willing, when Hester first came into the
neighborhood, to take a good-natured though precarious interest in
"their Vicar's sister." Indeed, Mrs. Gresley had felt obliged to warn
Hester not to count too much on their attentions, "as they sometimes
dropped people as quickly as they took them up."

Hester was ignorant of country life, of its small society, its
inevitable relations with unsympathetic neighbors just because they were
neighbors; and she was specially ignorant of the class to which Mrs.
Gresley and the Pratts belonged, and from which her aunt had in her
lifetime unwisely guarded her niece as from the plague. She was amazed
at first at the Pratts calling her by her Christian name without her
leave, until she discovered that they spoke of the whole county by their
Christian names, even designating Lord Newhaven's two younger
brothers--with whom they were not acquainted--as Jack and Harry, though
they were invariably called by their own family John and Henry.

When, after her aunt's death, she had, by the advice of her few
remaining relatives, taken up her abode with her brother, as much on his
account as her own, for he was poor and with an increasing family, she
journeyed to Warpington accompanied by a pleasant feeling that, at any
rate, she was not going among strangers. She had often visited in
Middleshire, at Wilderleigh, in the elder Mr. Loftus's time, for whom
she had entertained an enthusiastic reverence; at Westhope Abbey, where
she had a firm ally in Lord Newhaven, and at several other Middleshire
houses. She was silly enough to think she knew Middleshire fairly well,
but after she settled at Warpington she gradually discovered the
existence of a large undercurrent of society of which she knew nothing
at all, in which, whether she were willing or not, she was plunged by
the fact that she was her brother's sister.

Hester perceived clearly enough that her brother did not by birth belong
to this set, though his profession brought him in contact with it, but
he had evidently, though involuntarily, adopted it for better for worse;
perhaps because a dictatorial habit is generally constrained to find
companionship in a social grade lower than its own, where a loud voice
and a tendency to monologue checkered by prehistoric jokes and tortured
puns may meet with