he
feared his daughter's uprightness of character, he had never lost an
occasion of pouring scorn on her unpractical ways.

"Can you take it home for me, James?" would ask a neighbour, handing up
a case of eggs to the cart, where James sat preparing to leave the
market.

"There's no women in the cart," James would reply, and supposed he had
given the required assent.

The "round-about ways of doing things," which had been the butt of her
shrewd old father, had brought upon Anne a customary air of
half-readiness, so that going in suddenly, she might be found with her
bonnet on and her handkerchief on the table, but one perceived she was
still in her petticoat, and was making a pie for dinner. Meals, indeed,
she considered as things to be got out of the way, both her own, and, to
their expressed discomfort, those of other people. She herself often ate
them as she went about her work, pausing to take a spoonful from a plate
on the table or from the saucepan itself.

Taking the Scripture as the literal rule of the smallest details of her
life, she never wore a mixture of wool and cotton, as that was forbidden
to the Jews, nor would she wear any imitation of linen for the same
reason. In consequence, her clothes, which were of sound material, never
looked common, but always out-of-date.

She could be got (not that many people had tried to do so) to do nothing
quite like other people, not from perversity as some readily declared,
or a desire to "be different," but from inability to acquire the point
of view from which the most ordinary actions are done. She took no money
on Sunday, and this becoming known to her ne'er-do-well neighbours, they
made a point of forgetting to come for milk on Saturday.

"You must tell your mother I never sell milk on Sunday."

"Yes, Miss Hilton."

"I'll give you a little to go on with, but next week you must come for
it on Saturday."

And the child, having got what she wanted, would run off with the jug of
milk and the money which should have paid for it, to repeat exactly the
same offence the following week. Her reputation for queerness let her be
considered fair game, and so convinced is the ordinary person that
queerness is of necessity contemptible, that when she did anything which
was unusual, its reason was never examined, nor did the possibility that
it might be better done in that way occur to anybody. It was merely a
new evidence of her oddity.

But it was especially in tho