im to get a few of the humbler people about,
clergy, professional men, and so on, to dine with him sometimes. And he
often fills the Hall, I am told, with London people for a day or two.
But otherwise, he knows no one, and nobody knows him.'

'But you say he has a widowed sister? How does she relish the kind of
life?'

'Oh, by all accounts,' said the Rector with a shrug, 'she is as little
like other people as himself. A queer elfish little creature, they say,
as fond of solitude down here as the Squire, and full of hobbies. In her
youth she was about the Court. Then she married a Canon of Warham,
one of the popular preachers, I believe, of the day. There is a bright
little cousin of hers, a certain Lady Helen Varley, who lives near here,
and tells one stories of her. She must be the most whimsical little
aristocrat imaginable. She liked her husband apparently, but she never
got over leaving London and the fashionable world, and is as hungry now,
after her long fast, for titles and big-wigs, as though she were the
purest parvenu. The Squire of course makes mock of her, and she has no
influence with him. However, there is something naive in the stories
they tell of her. I feel as if I might get on with her. But the Squire!'

And the Rector, having laid down his pipe, took to studying his boots
with a certain dolefulness.

Langham, however, who always treated the subjects of conversation
presented to him as an epicure treats food, felt at this point that he
had had enough of the Wendovers, and started something else.

'So you physic bodies as well as Minds?' he said, pointing to the
medicine cupboard.

'I should think so!' cried Robert, brightening at once. Last winter I
causticked all the diphtheritic throats in the place with my own hand.
Our parish doctor is an infirm old noodle, and I just had to do it. And
if the state of part of the parish remains what it is, it's a pleasure I
may promise myself most years. But it shan't remain what it is.'

And the Rector reached out his hand again for his pipe, and gave one or
two energetic puffs to it as he surveyed his friend stretched before him
in the depths of an armchair.

'I will make myself a public nuisance, but the people shall have their
drains!'

'It seems to me,' said Langham, musing, 'that in my youth people talked
about Ruskin; now they talk about drains.'

'And quite right too. Dirt and drains, Catherine says I have gone mad
upon them. It's all very well