as uncomfortable as Lord Cashel, and
she had, to a certain extent, made the whole household as much so as
herself. Not that there was anything of the kill-joy character in
Fanny's composition; but that the natural disposition of Grey Abbey
and all belonging to it was to be dull, solemn, slow, and respectable.
Fanny alone had ever given any life to the place, or made the house
tolerable; and her secession to the ranks of the sombre crew was
therefore the more remarked. If Fanny moped, all Grey Abbey might
figuratively be said to hang down its head. Lady Cashel was, in every
sense of the words, continually wrapped up in wools and worsteds. The
earl was always equally ponderous, and the specific gravity of Lady
Selina could not be calculated. It was beyond the power of figures,
even in algebraic denominations, to describe her moral weight.

And now Fanny did mope, and Grey Abbey was triste [43] indeed.
Griffiths in my lady's boudoir rolled and unrolled those huge white
bundles of mysterious fleecy hosiery with more than usually slow and
unbroken perseverance. My lady herself bewailed the fermentation among
the jam-pots with a voice that did more than whine, it was almost
funereal. As my lord went from breakfast-room to book-room, from
book-room to dressing-room, and from dressing-room to dining-room, his
footsteps creaked with a sound more deadly than that of a death-watch.
The book-room itself had caught a darker gloom; the backs of the books
seemed to have lost their gilding, and the mahogany furniture its
French polish. There, like a god, Lord Cashel sate alone, throned amid
clouds of awful dulness, ruling the world of nothingness around by the
silent solemnity of his inertia.

[FOOTNOTE 43: triste--(French) sad, mournful, dull, dreary]

Lady Selina was always useful, but with a solid, slow activity, a
dignified intensity of heavy perseverance, which made her perhaps more
intolerable than her father. She was like some old coaches which we
remember--very sure, very respectable; but so tedious, so monotonous,
so heavy in their motion, that a man with a spark of mercury in his
composition would prefer any danger from a faster vehicle to their
horrid, weary, murderous, slow security. Lady Selina from day to day
performed her duties in a most uncompromising manner; she knew what was
due to her position, and from it, and exacted and performed accordingly
with a stiff, steady propriety which made her an awful if not a