that not one of them was in order. She had far too much,
as she declared, for any one pair of hands and a growing
family, and if the ceiling was not dropping in the
drawing-room, the cornice was cracked in the library or
the gas was leaking in the dining-room, or the verandah
wanted reflooring if anyone coming to the house was not
to put his foot through it; and as to the barn, if it
was dropping to pieces it would just have to drop. The
barn was definitely outside the radius of possible
amelioration--it passed gradually, visibly, into
decrepitude, and Mrs Murchison often wished she could
afford to pull it down.

It may be realized that in spite of its air of being
impossible to "overtake"--I must, in this connection,
continue to quote its mistress--there was an attractiveness
about the dwelling of the Murchisons the attractiveness
of the large ideas upon which it had been built and
designed, no doubt by one of those gentlefolk of reduced
income who wander out to the colonies with a nebulous
view to economy and occupation, to perish of the
readjustment. The case of such persons, when they arrive,
is at once felt to be pathetic; there is a tacit local
understanding that they have made a mistake. They may be
entitled to respect, but nothing can save them from the
isolation of their difference and their misapprehension.
It was like that with the house. The house was admired--
without enthusiasm--but it was not copied. It was felt
to be outside the general need, misjudged, adventitious;
and it wore its superiority in the popular view like a