illusions; and, while adhering to every social convention, she did so with
a toleration pleasantly contemptuous; in her heart she had no mercy for
snobs of any kind, though, unfortunately, she was at times absurdly
intimidated by them--at other times she was not.

To the west, within a radius of twelve miles, she knew everybody and
everybody knew her; to the east her fame was bounded only by the regardless
sea. She and her ancestors had lived in the village of Moze as long as even
Mr. Mathew Moze and his ancestors. In the village, and to the village, she
was Miss Ingate, a natural phenomenon, like the lie of the land and the
river Moze. Her opinions offended nobody, not Mr. Moze himself--she was
Miss Ingate. She was laughed at, beloved and respected. Her sagacity had
one flaw, and the flaw sprang from her sincere conviction that human nature
in that corner of Essex, which she understood so profoundly, and where she
was so perfectly at home, was different from, and more fondly foolish than,
human nature in any other part of the world. She could not believe that
distant populations could be at once so pathetically and so naughtily human
as the population in and around Moze.

If Audrey disdained Miss Ingate, it was only because Miss Ingate was
neither young nor fair nor the proprietress of some man, and because people
made out that she was peculiar. In some respects Audrey looked upon Miss
Ingate as a life-belt, as the speck of light at the end of a tunnel, as the
enigmatic smile which glimmers always in the frown of destiny.

"Well?" cried Miss Ingate in her rather shrill voice, grinning
sardonically, with the corners of her lips still lower than usual in
anticipatory sarcasm. It was as if she had said: "You cannot surprise me by
any narrative of imbecility or turpitude or bathos. All the same, I am
dying to hear the latest eccentricity of this village."