other found the performance indevotional, and raved that education
should be sacrificed to wretched music. But that the dissension was
sad and mischievous, it would have been very diverting; they were
both so young in their incapacity of making allowances, their
certainty that theirs was the theory to bring in the golden age, and
even in their magnanimity of forgiveness, and all the time they
thought themselves so very old. "I am resigned to disappointments;
I have seen something of life."--"You forget, Miss Williams, that my
ministerial experience is not very recent."

There was one who would have smoothed matters far better than any,
who, like Ermine, took her weapons from the armoury of good sense;
but that person was entirely unconscious how the incumbent regarded
her soft eyes, meek pensiveness, motherly sweetness, and, above all,
the refined graceful dignity that remained to her from the leading
station she had occupied. Her gracious respect towards her clergyman
was a contrast as much to the deferential coquetry of his admirers as
to the abruptness of his foe, and her indifference to parish details
had even its charm in a world of fussiness; he did not know himself
how far a wish of hers would have led him, and she was the last
person to guess. She viewed him, like all else outside her nursery,
as something out of the focus of her eye; her instinct regarded her
clergyman as necessarily good and worthy, and her ear heard Rachel
railing at him; it sounded hard, but it was a pity Rachel should be
vexed and interfered with. In fact, she never thought of the matter
at all; it was only part of that outer kind of dreamy stage-play at
Avonmouth, in which she let herself he moved about at her cousin's
bidding. One part of her life had passed away from her, and what
remained to her was among her children; her interests and
intelligence seemed contracted to Conrade's horizon, and as to