iterary dignity, even in Kensingate circles,
and would place her on a pinnacle in St. Chuddocks, where hardly any one
read French, and assuredly no one had heard of _L'Abreuvoir interdit_.

The Rector's wife might be content to turn her back complacently on the
country; it was the Rector's tragedy that the country turned its back on
him. With the best intention in the world and the immortal example of
Gilbert White before him, the Rev. Wilfrid found himself as bored and ill
at ease in his new surroundings as Charles II would have been at a modern
Wesleyan Conference. The birds that hopped across his lawn hopped across
it as though it were their lawn, and not his, and gave him plainly to
understand that in their eyes he was infinitely less interesting than a
garden worm or the rectory cat. The hedgeside and meadow flowers were
equally uninspiring; the lesser celandine seemed particularly unworthy of
the attention that English poets had bestowed on it, and the Rector knew
that he would be utterly miserable if left alone for a quarter of an hour
in its company. With the human inhabitants of his parish he was no
better off; to know them was merely to know their ailments, and the
ailments were almost invariably rheumatism. Some, of course, had other
bodily infirmities, but they always had rheumatism as well. The Rector
had not yet grasped the fact that in rural cottage life not to have
rheumatism is as glaring an omission as not to have been presented at
Court would be in more ambitious circles. And with all this death of
local interest there was Beryl shutting herself off with her ridiculous
labours on _The Forbidden Horsepond_.

"I don't see why you should suppose that any one wants to read Baptiste
Lepoy in English," the Reverend Wilfrid remarked to his wife one morning,
finding her surrounded with her usual elegant litter of dictionaries,
fountain pens, and scribbling paper; "hardly any one bothers to read him
now in France."

"My dear," said Beryl, with an intonation of gentle weariness, "haven't
two or three leading London publishers told me they wondered no one had
ever translated _L'Abreuvoir interdit_, and begged me--"

"Publishers always clamour for the books that no one has ever written,
and turn a cold shoulder on them as soon as they're written. If St. Paul
were living now they would pester him to write an Epistle to the
Esquimaux, but no London publisher would dream of reading his Epistle to
the Ephe