o, that would summon her
thrilling sympathy in regard to the fourth part: namely, the aristocratic
iciness of country magnates, who took them up and cast them off; as they
had done, she thought, at Craye Farm and at Creckholt: she remembered it,
of the latter place, wincingly, insurgently, having loved the dear home
she had been expelled from by her pride of the frosty surrounding
people--or no, not all, but some of them. And what had roused their
pride?

Striking for a reason, her inexperience of our modern England,
supplemented by readings in the England of a preceding generation, had
hit on her father's profession of merchant. It accounted to her for the
behaviour of the haughty territorial and titled families. But certain of
the minor titles headed City Firms, she had heard; certain of the
families were avowedly commercial. 'They follow suit,' her father said at
Creckholt, after he had found her mother weeping, and decided instantly
to quit and fly once more. But if they followed suit in such a way, then
Mr. Durance must be right when he called the social English the most
sheepy of sheep:--and Nesta could not consent to the cruel verdict, she
adored her compatriots. Incongruities were pacified for her by the
suggestion of her quick wits, that her father, besides being a merchant,
was a successful speculator; and perhaps the speculator is not liked by
merchants; or they were jealous of him; or they did not like his being
both.

She pardoned them with some tenderness, on a suspicion that a quaint old
high-frilled bleached and puckered Puritanical rectitude (her thoughts
rose in pictures) possibly condemned the speculator as a description of
gambler. An erratic severity in ethics is easily overlooked by the
enthusiast for things old English. She was consciously ahead of them in
the knowledge that her father had been, without the taint of gambling, a
beneficent speculator. The Montgomery colony in South Africa, and his
dealings with the natives in India, and his Railways in South America,
his establishment of Insurance Offices, which were Savings Banks, and the
Stores for the dispensing of sound goods to the poor, attested it. O and
he was hospitable, the kindest, helpfullest of friends, the dearest, the
very brightest of parents: he was his girl's playmate. She could be
critic of him, for an induction to the loving of him more justly: yet if
he had an excessive desire to win the esteem of people, as these keen
young