passed through there, which were deeply painful to her; and, moreover,
her sympathy with the clergy as a class was by no means strong.
Her experience had not been large, but the feeling based on it
promised to have all the tenacity of a favorite prejudice. Fortune
had handed over the parish of Harden to a ritualist vicar. Mrs.
Elsmere's inherited Evangelicalism--she came from an Ulster
county--rebelled against his doctrine, but the man himself was too
lovable to be disliked. Mrs. Elsmere knew a hero when she saw him.
And in his own narrow way, the small-headed emaciated vicar was a
hero, and he and Mrs. Elsmere had soon tasted each other's quality,
and formed a curious alliance, founded on true similarity in
difference.

But the criticism thus warded off the vicar expended itself with
all the more force on his subordinates. The Harden curates were
the chief crook in Mrs. Elsmere's otherwise tolerable lot. Her
parish activities brought her across them perpetually, and she could
not away with them. Their cassocks, their pretensions, their
stupidities, roused the Irish-woman's sense of humor at every turn.
The individuals came and went, but the type it seemed to her was
always the same; and she made their peculiarities the basis of a
pessimist theory as to the future of the English Church, which was
a source of constant amusement to the very broad-minded young men
who filled up the school staff. She, so ready in general to see
all the world's good points, was almost blind when it was a curate's
virtues which were in question. So that, in spite of all her
persistent church-going, and her love of church performances as an
essential part of the busy human spectacle, Mrs. Elsmere had no
yearning for a clerical son. The little accidents of a personal
experience had led to wide generalizations, as is the way with us