tty and picturesque use of dialect
words--those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

It was dinner-time--they never met except at meals--and she happened to
say when he was rising from table, wishing to show him something, "If
you'll bide where you be a minute, father, I'll get it."

"'Bide where you be,'" he echoed sharply, "Good God, are you only fit to
carry wash to a pig-trough, that ye use such words as those?"

She reddened with shame and sadness.

"I meant 'Stay where you are,' father," she said, in a low, humble
voice. "I ought to have been more careful."

He made no reply, and went out of the room.

The sharp reprimand was not lost upon her, and in time it came to
pass that for "fay" she said "succeed"; that she no longer spoke of
"dumbledores" but of "humble bees"; no longer said of young men and
women that they "walked together," but that they were "engaged"; that
she grew to talk of "greggles" as "wild hyacinths"; that when she had
not slept she did not quaintly tell the servants next morning that she
had been "hag-rid," but that she had "suffered from indigestion."

These improvements, however, are somewhat in advance of the story.
Henchard, being uncultivated himself, was the bitterest critic the fair
girl could possibly have had of her own lapses--really slight now, for
she read omnivorously. A gratuitous ordeal was in store for her in the
matter of her handwriting. She was passing the dining-room door one
evening, and had occasion to go in for something. It was not till she
had opened the door that she knew the Mayor was there in the company of
a man with whom he transacted business.

"Here, Elizabeth-Jane," he said, looking round at her, "just write down
what I tell you--a few words of an agreement for me and this gentleman
to sign. I am a poor tool with a pen."

"Be jowned, and so be I," said the gentleman.

She brought forward blotting-book, paper, and ink, and sat down.

"Now then--'An agreement entered into this sixteenth day of
October'--write that first."

She started the pen in an elephantine march across the sheet. It was a
splendid round, bold hand of her own conception, a style that would have
stamped a woman as Minerva's own in more recent days. But other ideas
reigned then: Henchard's creed was that proper young girls wrote
ladies'-hand--nay, he believed that bristling characters were as innate
and inseparable a part of refined womanhood as sex itself. Hence when,