in England she would prefer to assume an English name, that is to say
if she wished to be married.'

Occasionally the Miss Hopgoods were encountered, and they confounded
Fenmarket sorely. On one memorable occasion there was a party at the
Rectory: it was the annual party into which were swept all the
unclassifiable odds-and-ends which could not be put into the two
gatherings which included the aristocracy and the democracy of the
place. Miss Clara Hopgood amazed everybody by 'beginning talk,' by
asking Mrs Greatorex, her hostess, who had been far away to Sidmouth
for a holiday, whether she had been to the place where Coleridge was
born, and when the parson's wife said she had not, and that she could
not be expected to make a pilgrimage to the birthplace of an infidel,
Miss Hopgood expressed her surprise, and declared she would walk
twenty miles any day to see Ottery St Mary. Still worse, when
somebody observed that an Anti-Corn-Law lecturer was coming to
Fenmarket, and the parson's daughter cried 'How horrid!' Miss
Hopgood talked again, and actually told the parson that, so far as
she had read upon the subject--fancy her reading about the Corn-
Laws!--the argument was all one way, and that after Colonel Thompson
nothing new could really be urged.

'What is so--' she was about to say 'objectionable,' but she
recollected her official position and that she was bound to be
politic--'so odd and unusual,' observed Mrs Greatorex to Mrs Tubbs
afterwards, 'is not that Miss Hopgood should have radical views. Mrs
Barker, I know, is a radical like her husband, but then she never
puts herself forward, nor makes speeches. I never saw anything quite
like it, except once in London at a dinner-party. Lady Montgomery
then went on in much the same way, but she was a baronet's wife; the