ubstantial advantages connected with the move, but there were certainly
some very obvious drawbacks. Neither the migratory clergyman nor his
wife were able to adapt themselves naturally and comfortably to the
conditions of country life. Beryl, Mrs. Gaspilton, had always looked
indulgently on the country as a place where people of irreproachable
income and hospitable instincts cultivated tennis-lawns and rose-gardens
and Jacobean pleasaunces, wherein selected gatherings of interested week-
end guests might disport themselves. Mrs. Gaspilton considered herself
as distinctly an interesting personality, and from a limited standpoint
she was doubtless right. She had indolent dark eyes and a comfortable
chin, which belied the slightly plaintive inflection which she threw into
her voice at suitable intervals. She was tolerably well satisfied with
the smaller advantages of life, but she regretted that Fate had not seen
its way to reserve for her some of the ampler successes for which she
felt herself well qualified. She would have liked to be the centre of a
literary, slightly political salon, where discerning satellites might
have recognised the breadth of her outlook on human affairs and the
undoubted smallness of her feet. As it was, Destiny had chosen for her
that she should be the wife of a rector, and had now further decreed that
a country rectory should be the background to her existence. She rapidly
made up her mind that her surroundings did not call for exploration; Noah
had predicted the Flood, but no one expected him to swim about in it.
Digging in a wet garden or trudging through muddy lanes were exertions
which she did not propose to undertake. As long as the garden produced
asparagus and carnations at pleasingly frequent intervals Mrs. Gaspilton
was content to approve of its expense and otherwise ignore its existence.
She would fold herself up, so to speak, in an elegant, indolent little
world of her own, enjoying the minor recreations of being gently rude to
the doctor's wife and continuing the leisurely production of her one
literary effort, _The Forbidden Horsepond_, a translation of Baptiste
Leopoy's _L'Abreuvoir interdit_. It was a labour which had already been
so long drawn-out that it seemed probable that Baptiste Lepoy would drop
out of vogue before her translation of his temporarily famous novel was
finished. However, the languid prosecution of the work had invested Mrs.
Gaspilton with a certain l