ation of anger.
The land-steward, a moderate and well-balanced man whose family also had
been with the Ashburnhams for over a century, took it upon himself to
explain that he considered Edward was pursuing a perfectly proper course
with his tenants. He erred perhaps a little on the side of generosity,
but hard times were hard times, and every one had to feel the pinch,
landlord as well as tenants. The great thing was not to let the land
get into a poor state of cultivation. Scotch farmers just skinned your
fields and let them go down and down. But Edward had a very good set of
tenants who did their best for him and for themselves. These arguments
at that time carried very little conviction to Leonora. She was,
nevertheless, much concerned by Edward's outburst of anger. The fact is
that Leonora had been practising economies in her department. Two of the
under-housemaids had gone and she had not replaced them; she had spent
much less that year upon dress. The fare she had provided at the dinners
they gave had been much less bountiful and not nearly so costly as
had been the case in preceding years, and Edward began to perceive a
hardness and determination in his wife's character. He seemed to see a
net closing round him--a net in which they would be forced to live like
one of the comparatively poor county families of the neighbourhood. And,
in the mysterious way in which two people, living together, get to know
each other's thoughts without a word spoken, he had known, even before
his outbreak, that Leonora was worrying about his managing of the
estates. This appeared to him to be intolerable. He had, too, a great
feeling of self-contempt because he had been betrayed into speaking
harshly to Leonora before that land-steward. She imagined that his nerve
must be deserting him, and there can have been few men more miserable
than Edward was at that period. You see, he was really a very simple
soul--very simple. He imagined that no man can satisfactorily accomplish
his life's work without loyal and whole-hearted cooperation of the woman
he lives with. And he was beginning to perceive dimly that, whereas
his own traditions were entirely collective, his wife was a sheer
individualist. His own theory--the feudal theory of an over-lord doing
his best by his dependents, the dependents meanwhile doing their best
for the over-lord--this theory was entirely foreign to Leonora's nature.
She came of a family of small Irish landlords--that