he had never given her parents a
moment of anxiety. What, then, was wrong with her from her father's
point of view? He was well into middle age; increasing years made him
yearn for the love of which his life had been starved; this craving
would have been appeased by love for his daughter, but the truth was
that he was repelled by the girl's perfection. She had never been known
to lose her temper; not once had she shown the least preference for any
of the eligible young men of her acquaintance; although always
becomingly dressed, she was never guilty of any feminine foibles, which
would have endeared her to her father. To him, such correctness
savoured of inhumanity; much of the same feeling affected the girl's
other relatives and friends, to the ultimate detriment of their esteem.

Hilda, Montague's second wife, was the type of woman that successful
industrialism turns out by the gross. Sincere, well-meaning, narrow,
homely, expensively but indifferently educated, her opinion on any
given subject could be predicted; her childlessness accentuated her
want of mental breadth. She read the novels of Mrs Humphry Ward; she
was vexed if she ever missed an Academy; if she wanted a change, she
frequented fashionable watering-places. She was much exercised by the
existence of the "social evil"; she belonged to and, for her,
subscribed heavily to a society professing to alleviate, if not to
cure, this distressing ailment of the body politic. She was the
honorary secretary of a vigilance committee, whose operations extended
to the neighbouring towns of Trowton and Devizeton. The good woman was
ignorant that the starvation wages which her husband's companies paid
were directly responsible for the existence of the local evil she
deplored, and which she did her best to eradicate.

Miss Spraggs, Hilda Devitt's elder sister, lived with the family at
Melkbridge House. She was a virgin with a taste for scribbling, which
commonly took the form of lengthy letters written to those she thought
worthy of her correspondence. She had diligently read every volume of
letters, which she could lay hands on, of persons whose performance was
at all renowned in this department of literature (foreign ones in
translations), and was by way of being an agreeable rattle, albeit of a
pinchbeck, provincial genus. Miss Spraggs was much courted by her
relations, who were genuinely proud of her local literary reputation.
Also, let it be said, that she had the d