per right-hand corner, like printer's copy. She had to tell him that
he must bring his mother to call upon her; and then he was so long
doing it that Louise imagined a timidity in his mother which he was too
proud to own, and made her own mother go with her to see Mrs. Maxwell in
the house which she partly let out in lodgings on a very modest street.
It really did not matter about any of those things though, and she and
Maxwell's mother got on very well after the first plunge, though the
country doctor's widow was distinctly a country person, with the narrow
social horizons of a villager whose knowledge of the city was confined
to the compass of her courageous ventures in it.

To her own mother Louise feigned to see nothing repulsive in the
humility of these. She had been rather fastidiously worldly, she had
been even aggressively worldly, in her preference for a luxurious and
tasteful setting, and her mother now found it hard to bear her contented
acceptance of the pervading commonness of things at Mrs. Maxwell's.
Either her senses were holden by her fondness for Maxwell, or else she
was trying to hoodwink her mother by an effect of indifference; but Mrs.
Hilary herself was certainly not obtuse to that commonness. If she did
not rub it into Louise, which would have done no good, she did rub it
into Louise's father, though that could hardly have been said to do any
good either. Her report of the whole affair made him writhe, but when
she had made him writhe enough she began to admit some extenuating
circumstances. If Mrs. Maxwell was a country person, she was not
foolish. She did not chant, in a vain attempt to be genteel in her
speech; she did not expand unduly under Mrs. Hilary's graciousness, and
she did not resent it. In fact, the graciousness had been very skilfully
managed, and Mrs. Maxwell had not been allowed to feel that there was
any condescension to her. She got on with Louise very well; if Mrs.
Maxwell had any overweening pride in her son, she kept it as wholly to
herself as any overweening pride she might have had in her son's choice.

Mrs. Hilary did not like her daughter's choice, but she had at last
reached such resignation concerning it as the friends of a hopeless
invalid may feel when the worst comes. She had tried to stop the affair
when there was some hope or some use in trying, and now she determined
to make the best of it. The worst was that Maxwell was undoubtedly of
different origin and breeding