e Farm and at Creckholt: she
remembered it, of the latter place, wincingly, insurgently, having loved
the dear home she had been expelled from by her pride of the frosty
surrounding people--or no, not all, but some of them. And what had
roused their pride?

Striking for a reason, her inexperience of our modern England,
supplemented by readings in the England of a preceding generation, had
hit on her father's profession of merchant. It accounted to her for the
behaviour of the haughty territorial and titled families. But certain
of the minor titles headed City Firms, she had heard; certain of the
families were avowedly commercial. 'They follow suit,' her father
said at Creckholt, after he had found her mother weeping, and decided
instantly to quit and fly once more. But if they followed suit in such
a way, then Mr. Durance must be right when he called the social English
the most sheepy of sheep:--and Nesta could not consent to the cruel
verdict, she adored her compatriots. Incongruities were pacified for her
by the suggestion of her quick wits, that her father, besides being a
merchant, was a successful speculator; and perhaps the speculator is not
liked by merchants; or they were jealous of him; or they did not like
his being both.

She pardoned them with some tenderness, on a suspicion that a quaint old
high-frilled bleached and puckered Puritanical rectitude (her thoughts
rose in pictures) possibly condemned the speculator as a description
of gambler. An erratic severity in ethics is easily overlooked by the
enthusiast for things old English. She was consciously ahead of them in
the knowledge that her father had been, without the taint of gambling,
a beneficent speculator. The Montgomery colony in South Africa, and his
dealings with the natives in India, and his Railways in South America,
his establishment of Insurance Offices, which were Savings Banks, and
the Stores for the dispensing of sound goods to the poor, attested it. O
and he was hospitable, the kindest, helpfullest of friends, the dearest,
the very brightest of parents: he was his girl's playmate. She could be
critic of him, for an induction to the loving of him more justly: yet
if he had an excessive desire to win the esteem of people, as these keen
young optics perceived in him, he strove to deserve it; and no one could
accuse him of laying stress on the benefits he conferred. Designedly,
frigidly to wound a man so benevolent, appeared to her as an
inco