on. She therefore very
quickly put those things from her and thenceforth lived in the world as
in a castle surrounded by a dark moat filled with horrible and slimy
creatures who would raise a head at her did she so much as glance their
way.

She decided then never to look, and from a very early age those
quarters of life became to her "queer," indecent, and dangerous. All
the more she fastened her grip upon the things that she could see and
hold, and these things repaid her devotion by never deceiving her or
pretending to be what they were not. She believed intensely in forms
and repetitions; she liked everything to be where she expected it to
be, people to say the things that she expected them to say, clocks to
strike at the right time, and trains to be up to the minute. With all
this she could never be called an accurate or careful woman. She was
radically stupid, stupid in the real sense of the word, so that her
mind did not grasp a new thought or fact until it had been repeated to
her again and again, so that she had no power of expressing herself,
and a deep inaccuracy about everything and every one which she
endeavoured to cover by a stream of aimless lies that deceived no one.
She would of course have been very indignant had any one told her that
she was stupid. She hated what she called "clever people" and never had
them near her if she could help it. She was instantly suspicious of any
one who liked ideas or wanted anything changed. With all this she was
of an extreme obstinacy and a deep, deep jealousy. She clung to what
she had with the tenacity of a mollusc. What she had was in the main
Paul, and her affection for him was a very real human quality in her.

He was exactly what she would have chosen had she been allowed at the
beginning a free choice. He was lazy and good-tempered so that he
yielded to her on every possible point, he was absolutely orthodox and
never shocked her by a thought or a word out of the ordinary, he really
loved her and believed in her and said, quite truly, that he would not
have known what to do without her.

It seems strange then that it should have been in the main her urgency
that led to the acquisition of Maggie. During the last year she had
begun to be seriously uneasy. Things were not what they had been. Mrs.
Constantine and others in the parish were challenging her authority,
even the Choir boys were scarcely so subservient as they had been, and,
worst of all, Paul himself