ot an hour too fast, it had already struck six.
The lapse of time was rendered the more unendurable to Mrs. Jerome by her
wonder that Mr. Jerome could stay out in the garden with Lizzie in that
thoughtless way, taking it so easily that tea-time was long past, and
that, after all the trouble of getting down the best tea-things, Mr.
Tryan would not come.

This honour had been shown to Mr. Tryan, not at all because Mrs. Jerome
had any high appreciation of his doctrine or of his exemplary activity as
a pastor, but simply because he was a 'Church clergyman', and as such was
regarded by her with the same sort of exceptional respect that a white
woman who had married a native of the Society Islands might be supposed
to feel towards a white-skinned visitor from the land of her youth. For
Mrs. Jerome had been reared a Churchwoman, and having attained the age of
thirty before she was married, had felt the greatest repugnance in the
first instance to renouncing the religious forms in which she had been
brought up. 'You know,' she said in confidence to her Church
acquaintances, 'I wouldn't give no ear at all to Mr. Jerome at fust; but
after all, I begun to think as there was a maeny things worse nor goin'
to chapel, an' you'd better do that nor not pay your way. Mr. Jerome had
a very pleasant manner with him, an' there was niver another as kept a
gig, an' 'ud make a settlement on me like him, chapel or no chapel. It
seemed very odd to me for a long while, the preachin' without book, an'
the stannin' up to one long prayer, istid o' changin' your postur. But
la! there's nothin' as you mayn't get used to i' time; you can al'ys sit
down, you know, before the prayer's done. The ministers say pretty nigh
the same things as the Church parsons, by what I could iver make out, an'
we're out o' chapel i' the mornin' a deal sooner nor they're out o'
church. An' as for pews, ourn's is a deal comfortabler nor aeny i' Milby
Church.'

Mrs. Jerome, you perceive, had not a keen susceptibility to shades of
doctrine, and it is probable that, after listening to Dissenting
eloquence for thirty years, she might safely have re-entered the
Establishment without performing any spiritual quarantine. Her mind,
apparently, was of that non-porous flinty character which is not in the
least danger from surrounding damp. But on the question of getting start
of the sun on the day's business, and clearing her conscience of the
necessary sum of meals and the consequ