houses. These questions were considered by all the curates as, to the
last degree, audacious and impious.

Tea was a long time in progress; all the guests gabbled as their hostess
had expected they would. Mr. Helstone, being in excellent spirits--when,
indeed, was he ever otherwise in society, attractive female society? it
being only with the one lady of his own family that he maintained a grim
taciturnity--kept up a brilliant flow of easy prattle with his
right-hand and left-hand neighbours, and even with his _vis-a-vis_, Miss
Mary; though, as Mary was the most sensible, the least coquettish, of
the three, to her the elderly widower was the least attentive. At heart
he could not abide sense in women. He liked to see them as silly, as
light-headed, as vain, as open to ridicule as possible, because they
were then in reality what he held them to be, and wished them to
be--inferior, toys to play with, to amuse a vacant hour, and to be
thrown away.

Hannah was his favourite. Harriet, though beautiful, egotistical, and
self-satisfied, was not quite weak enough for him. She had some genuine
self-respect amidst much false pride, and if she did not talk like an
oracle, neither would she babble like one crazy; she would not permit
herself to be treated quite as a doll, a child, a plaything; she
expected to be bent to like a queen.

Hannah, on the contrary, demanded no respect, only flattery. If her
admirers only _told_ her that she was an angel, she would let them
_treat_ her like an idiot. So very credulous and frivolous was she, so
very silly did she become when besieged with attention, flattered and
admired to the proper degree, that there were moments when Helstone
actually felt tempted to commit matrimony a second time, and to try the
experiment of taking her for his second helpmeet; but fortunately the
salutary recollection of the _ennuis_ of his first marriage, the
impression still left on him of the weight of the millstone he had once
worn round his neck, the fixity of his feelings respecting the
insufferable evils of conjugal existence, operated as a check to his
tenderness, suppressed the sigh heaving his old iron lungs, and
restrained him from whispering to Hannah proposals it would have been
high fun and great satisfaction to her to hear.

It is probable she would have married him if he had asked her; her
parents would have quite approved the match. To them his fifty-five
years, his bend-leather heart, could have