ul dignity that remained to her from the leading station she had
occupied. Her gracious respect towards her clergyman was a contrast as
much to the deferential coquetry of his admirers as to the abruptness of
his foe, and her indifference to parish details had even its charm in a
world of fussiness; he did not know himself how far a wish of hers would
have led him, and she was the last person to guess. She viewed him, like
all else outside her nursery, as something out of the focus of her eye;
her instinct regarded her clergyman as necessarily good and worthy, and
her ear heard Rachel railing at him; it sounded hard, but it was a pity
Rachel should be vexed and interfered with. In fact, she never thought
of the matter at all; it was only part of that outer kind of dreamy
stage-play at Avonmouth, in which she let herself he moved about at her
cousin's bidding. One part of her life had passed away from her,
and what remained to her was among her children; her interests
and intelligence seemed contracted to Conrade's horizon, and as to
everything else, she was subdued, gentle, obedient, but slow and obtuse.

Yet, little as he knew it, Mr. Touchett might have even asserted his
authority in a still more trying manner. If the gentle little widow had
not cast a halo round her relatives, he could have preached that sermon
upon the home-keeping duties of women, or have been too much offended
to accept any service from the Curtis family; and he could have done
without them, for he had a wide middle-class popularity; his manners
with the second-rate society, in which he had been bred, were just
sufficiently superior and flattering to recommend all his best
points, and he obtained plenty of subscriptions from visitors, and of
co-operation from inhabitants. Many a young lady was in a flutter at the
approach of the spruce little figure in black, and so many volunteers
were there for parish work, that districts and classes were divided and
subdivided, till it sometimes seemed as if the only difficulty was to
find poor people enough who would submit to serve as the corpus vile for
their charitable treatment.

For it was not a really poor population. The men were seafaring, the
women lacemaking, and just well enough off to make dissent doubly
attractive as an escape from some of the interfering almsgiving of the
place. Over-visiting, criticism of dress, and inquisitorial examinations
had made more than one Primitive Methodist, and no se