Now, why on earth should Mrs. Cadwallader have been at all busy
about Miss Brooke's marriage; and why, when one match that she
liked to think she had a hand in was frustrated, should she have
straightway contrived the preliminaries of another? Was there
any ingenious plot, any hide-and-seek course of action, which
might be detected by a careful telescopic watch? Not at all:
a telescope might have swept the parishes of Tipton and Freshitt,
the whole area visited by Mrs. Cadwallader in her phaeton,
without witnessing any interview that could excite suspicion,
or any scene from which she did not return with the same unperturbed
keenness of eye and the same high natural color. In fact, if that
convenient vehicle had existed in the days of the Seven Sages,
one of them would doubtless have remarked, that you can know little
of women by following them about in their pony-phaetons. Even
with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making
interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for whereas
under a weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active
voracity into which other smaller creatures actively play as if they
were so many animated tax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you
certain tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims
while the swallower waits passively at his receipt of custom.
In this way, metaphorically speaking, a strong lens applied to
Mrs. Cadwallader's match-making will show a play of minute causes
producing what may be called thought and speech vortices to bring
her the sort of food she needed. Her life was rurally simple,
quite free from secrets either foul, dangerous, or otherwise important,
and not consciously affected by the great affairs of the world.
All the more did the affairs of the great world interest her,
when communicated in the letters of high-born relations: the way
in which fascinating younger sons had gone to the dogs by marrying