n as my lord the Count's
chief bailiff, but was also reputed to be the richest man for miles
around.

Eros Bela had long ago made public his determination to win Elsa for
wife, and he had carried his courtship unostentatiously but persistently
all along, despite the many rivals in the field. Elsa never disliked
him, she accepted his attentions just as she did those of everyone else.
Periodically Bela would make a formal proposal of marriage, which Irma
neni, in her own name and that of Elsa's paralytic father, invariably
accepted. But to his sober and well-worded proposals Elsa gave the same
replies that she gave to her more impetuous adorers.

"I don't want to marry. Not yet!"

When the work of taking Elsa in hand began in earnest, Irma used Eros
Bela as her chief weapon of attack. He was very rich, young enough to
marry, my lord the Count looked upon him as his right hand--moreover
Bela had made Irma neni a solemn promise that if Elsa became his wife,
his father and mother-in-law should receive that fine house in the
Kender Road to live in, with a nice piece of garden, three cows and five
pigs, and a little maid-of-all-work to wait upon them.

Backed with such a bargain, Bela's suit was bound to prosper.

And yet, for another whole year, Elsa was obstinate. Irma had to resort
to sterner measures, and in a country like Hungary, where much of the
patriarchal feeling toward parents still exists, a mother's stern
measures become very drastic indeed. A child is a child while she is
under her parents' roof. If she be forty she still owes implicit
obedience, unbounded respect to them. If she fail in these, she becomes
an unnatural creature, denounced to her friends as such, under a cloud
of opprobrium before her tiny, circumscribed world.

Kapus Irma brought out the whole armoury of her parental authority, her
parental power: and her methods could be severe when she chose. I will
not say that she ill-treated the girl, though it was more than once that
Elsa's right cheek and ear were crimson when the left were quite pale,
and that often, on the hot Sundays in July and August, when the girls go
in low-necked corslets and shifts to church, Elsa wrapped a kerchief
over her shoulders--the neighbours said in order to hide the corrections
dealt by Irma neni's vigorous hand. But it was morally that her mother's
authority weighed most heavily upon the girl. Her commands became more
defined, and presently more peremptory. Elsa w