es and the appreciation
of a genteel parish; no fat living or stall,[12] for which he never
looked, and didn't care; no sighs and praises of comfortable
dowagers[13] and well got-up young women who worked him slippers,
sugared his tea, and adored him as "a devoted man"; but a manly
respect, wrung from the unwilling souls of men who fancied his order
their natural enemies; the fear and hatred of every one who was false
or unjust in the district, were he master or man; and the blessed
sight of women and children daily becoming more human and more
homely,[14] a comfort to themselves and to their husbands and fathers.

[10] #Utopian#: fanciful.

[11] #Salver#: a tray.

[12] #Fat living or stall#: a high-salaried parish; stall: an
office in the church.

[13] #Dowager#: the widow of a person of wealth and rank.

[14] #Homely#: fond of home; domestic.

These things of course took time, and had to be fought for with toil
and sweat of brain and heart, and with the life-blood poured out. All
that, Arthur[15] had laid his account to give, and took as a matter of
course; neither pitying himself, nor looking on himself as a martyr,
when he felt the wear and tear making him feel old before his time,
and the stifling air of fever-dens telling on his health. His wife
seconded him in everything. She had been rather fond of society, and
much admired and run after before her marriage; and the London world
to which she had belonged pitied poor Fanny Evelyn when she married
the young clergyman, and went to settle in that smoky hole, Turley, a
very nest of Chartism[16] and Atheism, in a part of the country which
all the decent families had had to leave for years. However, somehow
or other she didn't seem to care. If her husband's living[17] had been
amongst green fields and near pleasant neighbors, she would have liked
it better,--that she never pretended to deny. But there they were; the
air wasn't bad, after all; the people were very good sort of
people,--civil to you if you were civil to them, after the first
brush; and they didn't expect to work miracles, and convert them all
off-hand into model Christians. So he and she went quietly among the
folk, talking to and treating them just as they would have done people
of their own rank. They didn't feel that they were doing anything out
of the common way, and so were perfectly natural and had none of that
condescension or consciousness of manner which so out-rag