preferment in the near future. To be a rector at thirty is unusual,
but he had great religious gifts, preached an admirable "as-man-to-man"
sermon, and did not believe in thinking about more than he could see. He
was an excellent father in the abstract sense, but the parish absorbed
too much of his time to allow of intimacies with anyone.

Mrs. Cole was the most placid lady in Europe. She had a comfortable
figure, but was not stout, here a dimple and there a dimple. Nothing
could disturb her. Children, servants, her husband's sermons, district
visiting, her Tuesday "at homes," the butcher, the dean's wife, the
wives of the canons, the Polchester climate, bills, clothes, other
women's clothes--over all these rocks of peril in the sea of daily life
her barque happily floated. Some ill-natured people thought her stupid,
but in her younger days she had liked Trollope's novels in the Cornhill,
disapproved placidly of "Jane Eyre," and admired Tennyson, so that she
could not be considered unliterary.

She was economical, warm-hearted, loved her children, talked only the
gentlest scandal, and was a completely happy woman--all this in the
placidest way in the world. Miss Amy Trefusis, her sister, was very
different, being thin both in her figure and her emotions. She skirted
tempestuously over the surface of things, was the most sentimental of
human beings, was often in tears over reminiscences of books or the
weather, was deeply religious in a superficial way, and really--although
she would have been entirely astonished had you told her so--cared for
no one in the world but herself. She was dressed always in dark colours,
with the high shoulders of the day, elegant bonnets and little chains
that jingled as she moved. In her soul she feared and distrusted
children, but she did not know this. She did know, however, that she
feared and distrusted her brother Samuel.

Her brother Samuel was all that the Trefusis family, as a conservative
body who believed in tradition, had least reason for understanding. He
had been a failure from the first moment of his entry into the Grammar
School in Polchester thirty-five years before this story. He had
continued a failure at Winchester and at Christ Church, Oxford. He had
desired to be a painter; he had broken from the family and gone to
study Art in Paris. He had starved and starved, was at death's door,
was dragged home, and there suddenly had relapsed into Polchester, lived
first on his