m her about herself, but the tears came streaming down her
big, coarse cheeks, on which the dust of the August road had left its
traces.

Mrs. Proudie has not been portrayed in these pages as an agreeable or
an amiable lady. There has been no intention to impress the reader
much in her favour. It is ordained that all novels should have a male
and a female angel and a male and a female devil. If it be considered
that this rule is obeyed in these pages, the latter character must
be supposed to have fallen to the lot of Mrs. Proudie. But she was
not all devil. There was a heart inside that stiff-ribbed bodice,
though not, perhaps, of large dimensions, and certainly not easily
accessible. Mrs. Quiverful, however, did gain access, and Mrs.
Proudie proved herself a woman. Whether it was the fourteen children
with their probable bare bread and their possible bare backs, or the
respectability of the father's work, or the mingled dust and tears on
the mother's face, we will not pretend to say. But Mrs. Proudie was
touched.

She did not show it as other women might have done. She did not give
Mrs. Quiverful eau-de-Cologne, or order her a glass of wine. She did
not take her to her toilet table and offer her the use of brushes
and combs, towels and water. She did not say soft little speeches
and coax her kindly back to equanimity. Mrs. Quiverful, despite her
rough appearance, would have been as amenable to such little tender
cares as any lady in the land. But none such were forthcoming.
Instead of this, Mrs. Proudie slapped one hand upon the other and
declared--not with an oath, for, as a lady and a Sabbatarian and a
she-bishop, she could not swear, but with an adjuration--that she
"wouldn't have it done."

The meaning of this was that she wouldn't have Mr. Quiverful's
promised appointment cozened away by the treachery of Mr. Slope and
the weakness of her husband. This meaning she very soon explained to
Mrs. Quiverful.

"Why was your husband such a fool," said she, now dismounted from her
high horse and sitting confidentially down close to her visitor, "as
to take the bait which that man threw to him? If he had not been so
utterly foolish, nothing could have prevented your going to the
hospital."

Poor Mrs. Quiverful was ready enough with her own tongue in accusing
her husband to his face of being soft, and perhaps did not always
speak of him to her children quite so respectfully as she might have
done. But she did not at a