'high tea,' that lady was seated in the vicarage garden, her
spectacles on her nose, a large _couvre-pied_ over her knees, and
the Whinborough newspaper on her lap. The neighborhood of this
last enabled her to make an intermittent pretence of reading; but
in reality the energies of her house-wifely mind were taken up with
quite other things. The vicar's wife was plunged in a housekeeping
experiment of absorbing interest. All her _solid_ preparations for
the evening were over, and in her own mind she decided that with
them there was no possible fault to be found. The cook, Sarah, had
gone about her work in a spirit at once lavish and fastidious,
breathed into her by her mistress. No better tongue, no plumper
chickens, than those which would grace her board to-night were to
be found, so Mrs. Thornburgh was persuaded, in the district. And
so with everything else of a substantial kind. On this head the
hostess felt no anxieties.

But a 'tea' in the north-country depends for distinction, not on
its solids or its savories, but on its sweets. A rural hostess
earns her reputation, not by a discriminating eye for butcher's-meat,
but by her inventiveness in cakes and custards. And it was just
here, with regard to this 'bubble reputation,' that the vicar's
wife of Long Whindale was particularly sensitive. Was she not
expecting Mrs. Seaton, the wife of the Rector of Whinborough--odious
woman--to tea? Was it not incumbent on her to do well, nay to do
brilliantly, in the eyes of this local magnate? And how was it
possible to do brilliantly in this matter with a cook whose recipes
were hopelessly old-fashioned, and who had an exasperating belief
in the sufficiency of buttered 'whigs' and home-made marmalade for
all requirements?