variable corrector of
the statements of others. "You held the reins, but William walked
beside."

Hester made the children shake hands with her guests, and then they
clustered round her to show what they had bought.

Though the Bishop was fond of children, he became suddenly restive. He
took out his watch, and was nervously surprised at the lapse of time.
The carriage was sent for, and in a few minutes that dignified vehicle
was bowling back to Southminster.

"I am not satisfied about Hester," said the Bishop. "She looks ill and
irritable, and she has the tense expression of a person who is making a
colossal effort to be patient, and whose patience, after successfully
meeting twenty calls upon it in the course of the day, collapses
entirely at the twenty-first. That is a humiliating experience."

"She spoke as if she were a trial to her brother and his wife."

"I think she is. I have a sort of sympathy with Gresley as regards his
sister. He has been kind to her according to his lights, and if she
could write little goody-goody books he would admire her immensely, and
so would half the neighborhood. It would be felt to be suitable. But
Hester jars against the preconceived ideas which depute that clergymen's
sisters and daughters should, as a matter of course, offer up their
youth and hair and teeth and eyesight on the altar of parochial work.
She does and is nothing that long custom expects her to do and be.
Originality is out of place in a clergyman's family, just because it is
so urgently needed. It is a constant source of friction. But, on the
other hand, the best thing that could happen to Hester is to be thrown
for a time among people who regard her as a nonentity, who have no sense
of humor, and to whom she cannot speak of any of the subjects she has at
heart. If Hester had remained in London after the success of her _Idyll_
she would have met with so much sympathy and admiration that her next
book would probably have suffered in consequence. She is so susceptible,
so expansive, that repression is positively necessary to her to enable
her, so to speak, to get up steam. There is no place for getting up
steam like a country vicarage with an inner cordon of cows round it and
an outer one of amiable country neighbors, mildly contemptuous of
originality in any form. She cannot be in sympathy with them in her
present stage. It is her loss, not theirs. At forty she will be in
sympathy with them, and appreciate them a