ve light hands, steady eyes, iron nerves, and those
excellent manners that have no mannerisms. It was his nature to
be easy-going as a husband; indulgent as a father; careful and
straightforward as a politician; and as a man, addicted to pleasure, to
work, and to fresh air. He admired, and was fond of his wife, and had
never regretted his marriage. He had never perhaps regretted anything,
unless it were that he had not yet won the Derby, or quite succeeded in
getting his special strain of blue-ticked pointers to breed absolutely
true to type. His mother-in-law he respected, as one might respect a
principle.

There was indeed in the personality of that little old lady the
tremendous force of accumulated decision--the inherited assurance of one
whose prestige had never been questioned; who, from long immunity, and a
certain clear-cut matter-of-factness, bred by the habit of command,
had indeed lost the power of perceiving that her prestige ever could
be questioned. Her knowledge of her own mind was no ordinary piece of
learning, had not, in fact, been learned at all, but sprang full-fledged
from an active dominating temperament. Fortified by the necessity,
common to her class, of knowing thoroughly the more patent side of
public affairs; armoured by the tradition of a culture demanded by
leadership; inspired by ideas, but always the same ideas; owning no
master, but in servitude to her own custom of leading, she had a
mind, formidable as the two-edged swords wielded by her ancestors
the Fitz-Harolds, at Agincourt or Poitiers--a mind which had ever
instinctively rejected that inner knowledge of herself or of the
selves of others; produced by those foolish practices of introspection,
contemplation, and understanding, so deleterious to authority. If Lord
Valleys was the body of the aristocratic machine, Lady Casterley was the
steel spring inside it. All her life studiously unaffected and simple in
attire; of plain and frugal habit; an early riser; working at
something or other from morning till night, and as little worn-out at
seventy-eight as most women of fifty, she had only one weak spot--and
that was her strength--blindness as to the nature and size of her place
in the scheme of things. She was a type, a force.

Wonderfully well she went with the room in which they were dining, whose
grey walls, surmounted by a deep frieze painted somewhat in the style
of Fragonard, contained many nymphs and roses now rather dim; with t