nize that
in some sedate and mysterious way they had a friend.

She would send presents to young people whose conduct had pleased her,
gifts which always excited surprise and sometimes derision. Once she
sent the substantial gift of a sack of potatoes to a young husband and
wife, but the present became chiefly an amusing recollection, because,
not having string, she had sewed the sack with darning-wool, with the
result that it burst open on the station platform before it reached its
destination.

A number of books, some of an old-fashioned theology, had been left to
Anne by an aunt who had had a son a Methodist preacher. This aunt had
also left her a black silk dress, which Anne had received with the
joyful exclamation that she knew she was really a king's daughter. The
books she read ardently and critically, underlining and marking, and
with them also she embarrassed the vicar to whom she lent them. He,
being a kind man, took the books and her comments in spite of his wife's
indignation. They had formed the standard of her conversation, which was
in ceremonial moments antiquated and dignified. Young women, and older
men with wives to guide their perceptions, thought her absurd, but young
men seldom did so. Perhaps that was because she seldom thought _them_
absurd, and understood something of the ambitions with which their heads
were filled. They were not, indeed, unlike those with which her own was
overflowing. Whenever she was angry it was at any meanness or injustice,
which seemed to arouse in her a Biblical passion of righteous fury.

A small meanness in another depressed her as much as if she had done it
herself. Once she had walked five miles to deliver some butter and
returned utterly dejected, not alone from fatigue, but because she had
been offered nothing to eat or drink after her long tramp. It would have
been useless to point out to her that she had gone on a purely business
errand. It was one of those small meannesses of which she was herself
incapable, and a proportion of warmth had died out of her belief.

"You know my sister Jane's son?" said a farmer's wife, who had stopped
her trap at the cottage to pick up a lidded wisket in which some
earthenware had been packed. "He's getting a good-looking young man and
he's all for bettering himself. Well, he went and got his photo taken at
Drayton and brought them in to show his mother. She was making jam at
the time, and she's not an easy tongue at the best o