only revealed an ample understanding of all he said, but
suggested unused reserves of comprehension which he might not fathom. It
was as if, intellectually no less than socially, she possessed a title
and he remained an undistinguished plebeian.

He made no grievance, however, even in his own thoughts, of either
inequality. She had been charmingly frank and fair about the question of
the names, when it first arose. The usage had latterly come to be, she
explained, for a widow bearing even a courtesy title derived from her
late husband, to retain it on marrying again. It was always the easiest
course to fall in with usage, but if he had any feelings on the subject,
and preferred to have her insist on being called Mrs. Thorpe, she would
meet his wishes with entire willingness. It had seemed to him, as to
her, that it was wisest to allow usage to settle the matter. Some months
after their marriage there appeared in the papers what purported to be
an authoritative announcement that the Queen objected to the practice
among ladies who married a second time, of retaining titles acquired by
the earlier marriages, and that the lists of precedency at Buckingham
Palace would henceforth take this into account. Lady Cressage showed
this to her husband, and talked again with candour on the subject. She
said she had always rather regretted the decision they originally came
to, and even now could wish that it might be altered, but that to effect
a change in the face of this newspaper paragraph would seem servile--and
in this as in most other things he agreed with her. As she said, they
wanted nothing of Buckingham Palace.

She wanted equally little, it seemed, of the society which the
neighbouring district might afford. There was a meagre routine of formal
calls kept in languid operation, Thorpe knew, but it was so much in the
background that he never came in contact with it. His own notions of
the part he ought to take in County affairs had undergone a silent and
unnoted, yet almost sweeping, change. What little he saw of the gentry
and strong local men with whom he would have to work, quietly undermined
and dismantled all his ambitions in that direction. They were not his
sort; their standards for the measurement of things were unintelligible
to him. He did not doubt that, if he set himself about it, he could
impose his dominion upon them, any more than he doubted that, if he
mastered the Chinese language, he could lift himself to be