figure, but was not stout, here a dimple and there a dimple. Nothing
could disturb her. Children, servants, her husband's sermons,
district visiting, her Tuesday "at homes," the butcher, the dean's
wife, the wives of the canons, the Polchester climate, bills,
clothes, other women's clothes--over all these rocks of peril in the
sea of daily life her barque happily floated. Some ill-natured
people thought her stupid, but in her younger days she had liked
Trollope's novels in the Cornhill, disapproved placidly of "Jane
Eyre," and admired Tennyson, so that she could not be considered
unliterary.

She was economical, warm-hearted, loved her children, talked only
the gentlest scandal, and was a completely happy woman--all this in
the placidest way in the world. Miss Amy Trefusis, her sister, was
very different, being thin both in her figure and her emotions. She
skirted tempestuously over the surface of things, was the most
sentimental of human beings, was often in tears over reminiscences
of books or the weather, was deeply religious in a superficial way,
and really--although she would have been entirely astonished had you
told her so--cared for no one in the world but herself. She was
dressed always in dark colours, with the high shoulders of the day,
elegant bonnets and little chains that jingled as she moved. In her
soul she feared and distrusted children, but she did not know this.
She did know, however, that she feared and distrusted her brother
Samuel.

Her brother Samuel was all that the Trefusis family, as a
conservative body who believed in tradition, had least reason for
understanding. He had been a failure from the first moment of his
entry into the Grammar School in Polchester thirty-five years before