secure. She could think of him without
any shadow of anxiety, her mind for once at rest. And this she enjoyed.
For it is possible to miss a person badly, long for their return
ardently, yet feel by no means averse to a holiday from more active
expenditure of love on their account.

And Theresa Bilson--pleasing thought!--was, for the moment, absent also,
having gone to tea with the Miss Minetts. Two maiden ladies, these, of
uncertain age, modest fortune and unimpeachable refinement, once like
Theresa herself, members of the scholastic profession; but now, thanks to
the timely death of a relative--with consequent annuities and life
interest in a ten-roomed, stone-built house of rather mournful aspect in
Deadham village--able to rest from their ineffectual labours, support the
Church, patronize their poorer and adulate their richer neighbours to
their guileless hearts' content.

Gentility exuded from the Miss Minetts, and--if it is permissible
slightly to labour the simile--their pores were permanently open. Owing
both to her antecedent and existing situation, it may be added, Theresa
Bilson was precious in their sight. For had she not in the past, like
themselves, sounded the many mortifications of a governess' lot; and was
she not now called up higher, promoted indeed to familiar, almost hourly,
intercourse with the great? Miss Felicia Verity was known to treat her
with affection. Mrs. Augustus Cowden, that true blue of county dames and
local aristocrats, openly approved her. She sat daily at Sir Charles
Verity's table and helped to order his household. What more genuine
patents of gentility could be asked? So they listened with a pleasure,
deep almost to agitation, to her performances upon the piano, her
reminiscences of Bonn and the Rhine Provinces, and, above all, to her
anecdotes of life at The Hard and of its distinguished owner's habits and
speech. Thus, by operation of the fundamental irony resident in things,
did Theresa Bilson, of all improbable and inadequate little people,
become to the Miss Minetts as a messenger of the gods; exciting in them
not only dim fluttering apprehensions of the glories of art and delights
of foreign travel, but--though in their determined gentility they knew it
not--of the primitive allurements and mysteries of sex.

The moral effect of this friendship upon Theresa herself was not,
however, of the happiest. Fired by their interest in her recitals she was
tempted to spread herself.