phaetons. Even
with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making
interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for whereas under a
weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity
into which other smaller creatures actively play as if they were so
many animated tax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain
tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the
swallower waits passively at his receipt of custom. In this way,
metaphorically speaking, a strong lens applied to Mrs. Cadwallader's
match-making will show a play of minute causes producing what may be
called thought and speech vortices to bring her the sort of food she
needed. Her life was rurally simple, quite free from secrets either
foul, dangerous, or otherwise important, and not consciously affected
by the great affairs of the world. All the more did the affairs of the
great world interest her, when communicated in the letters of high-born
relations: the way in which fascinating younger sons had gone to the
dogs by marrying their mistresses; the fine old-blooded idiocy of young
Lord Tapir, and the furious gouty humors of old Lord Megatherium; the
exact crossing of genealogies which had brought a coronet into a new
branch and widened the relations of scandal,--these were topics of
which she retained details with the utmost accuracy, and reproduced
them in an excellent pickle of epigrams, which she herself enjoyed the
more because she believed as unquestionably in birth and no-birth as
she did in game and vermin. She would never have disowned any one on
the ground of poverty: a De Bracy reduced to take his dinner in a basin
would have seemed to her an example of pathos worth exaggerating, and I
fear his aristocratic vices would not have horrified her. But her
feeling towards the vulgar rich was a sort of religious hatred: they
had probably made all their money out of high retail prices, and Mrs.
Cadwallader detested high prices for everything that was not paid in
kind at the Rectory: such people were no part of God's design in making
the world; and their accent was an affliction to the ears. A town
where such monsters abounded was hardly more than a sort of low comedy,
which could not be taken account of in a well-bred scheme of the
universe. Let any lady who is inclined to be hard on Mrs. Cadwallader
inquire into the comprehensiveness of her own beautiful views, and be
quite sure that they a