hat's one thing. It's another thing when you have a
shiftless man hanging round, and a dozen children or so, and expected
to be civil to all the world. They always have a house full of
children, and they are all shiftless."

"Who, mother?"

"Poor ministers."

"Father hadn't--and wasn't."

"He was as shiftless a man as ever wore shoe-leather; he wasn't a bit
of help to a woman. All he cared for was to lose his time in his books;
and that's the way this man'll do, and leave you to take the brunt of
everything. _Your_ time'll go in cookin' and mendin' and washin' up;
and you'll have to be at everybody's beck and call at the end o' that.
If there's anything _I_ hate, it's to be in the kitchen and parlour
both at the same time."

Diana was silent.

"You might have lived like a queen."

"I don't want to live like a queen."

"You might have had your own way, Diana."

"I don't care about having my own way."

"I wish you would care, then, or had a speck of spirit. What's life
good for?"

"I wish I knew"--said Diana wearily, as she rose and set back her chair.

"You never will know, in that man's house. I do think, ministers are
the meanest lot o' folks there is; and that you should go and take one
of them!"--

"It is the other way, mother; he has taken me," said Diana, half
laughing at what seemed to her the disproportion between her mother's
passion and the occasion for it.

"You were a fool to let him."

"I don't think so."

"You'll be sorry yet."

"Why?"

"They're a shiftless lot," said Mrs. Starling rather evasively, "the
whole of 'em. And this one has a way of holding his own in other folks'
houses, that is intolerable to me! I never liked him, not from the very
first."

"I always liked him," said Diana simply; and she went off to her room.
She had not expected that her mother would favour the arrangement; on
the contrary; and it had all been settled much more easily than she had
looked for.

CHAPTER XXI.

UNSETTLED.

So things were settled, and Mrs. Starling made no attempt to unsettle
them; on the other hand, she fell into a condition of permanent unrest
which I do not know how to characterize. It was not ill-humour exactly;
it was not displeasure; or if, it was displeasure at herself, but it
was contrary to all Mrs. Starling's principles to admit that, and she
never admitted it. Her farm servant, Josh, described her as being
always now in an "aggravated" state; and Diana found