too, because the loss of her old man had sent her thoughts wandering
among the enchanted fields of her young days, that she began to talk
sometimes to Jenny about her marriage, and to give her quaint advice on
the subject of "managing" husbands; "as if," Jenny smilingly said to
herself, "an old man like father was the same, belonged even to the same
race, as Theophil."

Perhaps Mrs. Talbot scented some such reflection in Jenny's expression;
at all events, she answered it with an "Eh, but all men are alike, my
dear, under their skins,--all alike, and they need humouring and
managing just in the same way, prince or peasant."

The idea of "managing" Theophil had something repulsive in it for Jenny;
there was an element of deceit, of cunning, implied which didn't go with
her ideas of true love and the life beautiful of which she was dreaming.
She didn't believe that men and women who loved were really different
from each other, and perhaps she was right.

About this time, too, Mrs. Talbot began to produce from mysterious
treasure-caves, entered apparently from an old press in her bedroom, all
kinds of wonderful things which would be useful to Jenny some day in her
house: terrible little ornaments,--very sacred, though,--sad
quaintnesses of the spirit of beauty pathetically fumbling about in
country brains; wool mats worked in the primary colours; and such wool
wonders as a wool basket of flowers, in which real wool flowers grew out
of a wool basket which you held by an over-arching wool handle, the
whole worked with undeniable but how forlorn ingenuity,--a prehistoric
relic of Mrs. Talbot's legendary school-days: survivals from a period
which is best summed up in the one wonderful word "antimacassar," a
period when for some unrecorded reason men and women had to protect