erience had not been large, but
the feeling based on it promised to have all the tenacity of a favorite
prejudice. Fortune had handed over the parish of Harden to a ritualist
vicar. Mrs. Elsmere's inherited Evangelicalism--she came from an Ulster
county--rebelled against his doctrine, but the man himself was too
lovable to be disliked. Mrs. Elsmere knew a hero when she saw him. And
in his own narrow way, the small-headed emaciated vicar was a hero, and
he and Mrs. Elsmere had soon tasted each other's quality, and formed a
curious alliance, founded on true similarity in difference.

But the criticism thus warded off the vicar expended itself with all the
more force on his subordinates. The Harden curates were the chief crook
in Mrs. Elsmere's otherwise tolerable lot. Her parish activities brought
her across them perpetually, and she could not away with them. Their
cassocks, their pretensions, their stupidities, roused the Irish-woman's
sense of humor at every turn. The individuals came and went, but
the type it seemed to her was always the same; and she made their
peculiarities the basis of a pessimist theory as to the future of the
English Church, which was a source of constant amusement to the very
broad-minded young men who filled up the school staff. She, so ready in
general to see all the world's good points, was almost blind when it was
a curate's virtues which were in question. So that, in spite of all
her persistent church-going, and her love of church performances as an
essential part of the busy human spectacle, Mrs. Elsmere had no yearning
for a clerical son. The little accidents of a personal experience had
led to wide generalizations, as is the way with us mortals, and the
position of the young parson in these days of increased parsonic
pretensions was, to Mrs. Elsmere, a position in which there was an
inherent risk of absurdity. She wished her son to impose upon her when
it came to his taking any serious step in life. She asked for nothing
better, indeed, than to be able, when the time came, to bow the motherly
knee to him in homage, and she felt a little dread lest, in her flat
moments, a clerical son might sometimes rouse in her that sharp sense of
the ludicrous which is the enemy of all happy illusions.

Still, of course, the Elsmere proposal was one to be seriously
considered in its due time and place. Mrs. Elsmere only reflected that
it would certainly be better to Say nothing of it to Robert until he