Now, as he watched her sway and dip before him, it only struck him that
she differed from the little misses on her either hand, but quite how,
except that he would have said she was jollier, more like a boy, he
couldn't have told. That indeed, translated from boy-like into
unmaidenly, was the town's chief complaint against her, or primarily
against her father. Mr. Eliot's position was not an easy one, and he did
nothing to make it easier. For he was half French, his mother having
been brought over as a little girl at the time of the Terror. There
were people still alive in the 'fifties and 'sixties who remembered the
Napoleonic wars and the shadow cast by that giant figure upon the world;
indeed, so slowly did thought move down in the far West that it might
almost have been said that St. Renny was just beginning to realise the
wars, and rather resented the fact that English and French had since
fought side by side in the Crimea. Also the vagaries of Napoleon III.
kept England in a perpetual state of distrust, in spite of the
championship of Lord Palmerston, then in his second Ministry. Mothers
still frighted their babes with the name of Boney, and the French were
still the hereditary enemies of all good Cornishmen, so many of whom had
gone to man the fleet that won at Trafalgar. The obscure feeling of
distrust that always stirs in the lower classes of remote districts at
anything alien did not, of course, extend to the educated people, but
Mr. Eliot, being poor and very eccentric, refused such championship from
his equals as might have been his.

He lived with his daughter and an old housekeeper in a little cottage on
the outskirts of the town, and earned his living by teaching at the
Grammar School and giving private lessons in French, dancing, fencing,
and physical culture generally. It was this latter that caused him to be
looked on with so much suspicion as an eccentric. He actually made his
daughter, attired in a skirt that only reached to her knees, perform