refinement; she had never given her parents a moment of anxiety.
What, then, was wrong with her from her father's point of view? He
was well into middle age; increasing years made him yearn for the
love of which his life had been starved; this craving would have
been appeased by love for his daughter, but the truth was that he
was repelled by the girl's perfection. She had never been known to
lose her temper; not once had she shown the least preference for any
of the eligible young men of her acquaintance; although always
becomingly dressed, she was never guilty of any feminine foibles,
which would have endeared her to her father. To him, such
correctness savoured of inhumanity; much of the same feeling
affected the girl's other relatives and friends, to the ultimate
detriment of their esteem.

Hilda, Montague's second wife, was the type of woman that successful
industrialism turns out by the gross. Sincere, well-meaning, narrow,
homely, expensively but indifferently educated, her opinion on any
given subject could be predicted; her childlessness accentuated her
want of mental breadth. She read the novels of Mrs Humphry Ward; she
was vexed if she ever missed an Academy; if she wanted a change, she
frequented fashionable watering-places. She was much exercised by
the existence of the "social evil"; she belonged to and, for her,
subscribed heavily to a society professing to alleviate, if not to
cure, this distressing ailment of the body politic. She was the
honorary secretary of a vigilance committee, whose operations
extended to the neighbouring towns of Trowton and Devizeton. The
good woman was ignorant that the starvation wages which her
husband's companies paid were directly responsible for the existence
of the local evil she deplored, and which she did her best to
eradicate.