d addled somehow, poor creature.'

Certainly it needed a faculty of laughter to be always able to take
Mrs. Elsmere on the right side. For instance, Catherine was more
often scandalized than impressed by her mother-in-law's charitable
performances.

Mrs. Elsmere's little cottage was filled with workhouse orphans sent to
her from different London districts. The training of these girls was the
chief business of her life, and a very odd training it was, conducted in
the noisiest way and on the most familiar terms. It was undeniable that
the girls generally did well and they invariably adored Mrs. Elsmere,
but Catherine did not much like to think about them. Their household
teaching under Mrs. Elsmere and her old servant Martha--as great an
original as herself, was so irregular, their religious training so
extraordinary, the clothes in which they were allowed to disport
themselves so scandalous to the sober taste of the rector's wife, that
Catherine involuntarily regarded the little cottage on the hill as a
spot of misrule in the general order of the parish. She would go in,
say, at eleven o'clock in the morning, find her mother-in-law in bed,
half-dressed, with all her handmaidens about her, giving her orders,
reading her letters and the newspaper, cutting out her girls' frocks,
instructing them in the fashions, or delivering little homilies on
questions suggested by the news of the day to the more intelligent of
them. The room, the whole house, would seem to Catherine in a detestable
litter. If so, Mrs. Elsmere never apologized for it. On the contrary, as
she saw Catherine sweep a mass of miscellaneous _debris_ off a chair
in search of a seat, the small bright eyes would twinkle with something
that was certainly nearer amusement than shame.

And in a hundred other ways Mrs. Elsmere's relations with the poor of
the parish often made Catherine miserable. She herself had the most
angelic pity and tenderness for sorrows and sinners; but sin was sin
to her, and when she saw Mrs. Elsmere more than half attracted by the
stronger vices, and in many cases more inclined to laugh with what was
human in them, than to weep over what was vile, Robert's wife would go
away and wrestle with herself, that she might be betrayed into nothing
harsh toward Robert's mother.

But fate allowed their differences, whether they were deep or shallow,
no time to develop. A week of bitter cold at the beginning of January
struck down Mrs. Elsmere, w