get her away mentally as far as possible from her natural and
individual life as an inhabitant of a peculiar island: to make her an
exact copy of tens of thousands of other people, in whose circumstances
there was nothing special, distinctive, or picturesque; to teach her to
forget all the experiences of her ancestors; to drown the local ballads
by songs purchased at the Budmouth fashionable music-sellers', and the
local vocabulary by a governess-tongue of no country at all. She lived
in a house that would have been the fortune of an artist, and learnt to
draw London suburban villas from printed copies.

Avice had seen all this before he pointed it out, but, with a girl's
tractability, had acquiesced. By constitution she was local to the
bone, but she could not escape the tendency of the age.

The time for Jocelyn's departure drew near, and she looked forward to
it sadly, but serenely, their engagement being now a settled thing.
Pierston thought of the native custom on such occasions, which had
prevailed in his and her family for centuries, both being of the old
stock of the isle. The influx of 'kimberlins,' or 'foreigners' (as
strangers from the mainland of Wessex were called), had led in a large
measure to its discontinuance; but underneath the veneer of Avice's
education many an old-fashioned idea lay slumbering, and he wondered
if, in her natural melancholy at his leaving, she regretted the
changing manners which made unpopular the formal ratification of a
betrothal, according to the precedent of their sires and grandsires.



1. III. THE APPOINTMENT