on its best sides!

Half-past ten arrived. Rose just let him touch her hand; Catherine gave
him a quiet good-night, with various hospitable wishes for his nocturnal
comfort, and the ladies withdrew. He saw Robert open the door for his
wife and catch her thin white fingers as she passed him with all the
secrecy and passion of a lover.

Then they plunged into the study, he and Robert, and smoked their fill.
The study was an astonishing medley. Books, natural history specimens,
a half-written sermon, fishing rods, cricket bats, a huge medicine
cupboard--all the main elements of Elsmere's new existence were
represented there. In the drawing-room with his wife and his
sister-in-law he had been as much of a boy as ever; here clearly he was
a man, very much in earnest. What about? What did it all come to? Can
the English country clergyman do much with his life and his energies.
Langham approached the subject with his usual skepticism.

Robert for awhile, however, did not help him to solve it. He fell at
once to talking about the Squire, as though it cleared his mind to talk
out his difficulties even to so ineffective a counsellor as Langham.
Langham, indeed was but faintly interested in the Squire's crimes as a
landlord, but there was a certain interest to be got out of the struggle
in Elsmere's mind between the attractiveness of the Squire, as one of
the most difficult and original personalties of English letters, and
that moral condemnation of him as a man of possessions and ordinary
human responsibilities with which the young reforming Rector was clearly
penetrated. So that, as long as he could smoke under it, he was content
to let his companion describe to him, Mr. Wendover's connection with the
property, his accession to it in middle life after a long residence in
Germany, his ineffectual attempts to play the English country gentleman,
and his subsequent complete withdrawal from the life about him.

'You have no idea what a queer sort of existence he lives in that huge
place,' said Robert with energy. 'He is not unpopular exactly with the
poor down here. When they want to belabor anybody they lay on at the
agent, Henslowe. On the whole, I have come to the conclusion the poor
like a mystery. They never see him; when he is here the park is shut up;
the common report is that he walks, at night; and he lives alone in that
enormous house with his books. The country folk have all quarrelled with
him, or nearly. It pleases h