d not have recognized its
ivory Princess in this bright being. She was the statue come to life,
the cool perfection kissed by expectation into a bewitching living
woman. I doubt whether Fritzing had ever noticed her beauty while at
Kunitz. He had seen her every day from childhood on, and it is
probable that his attention being always riveted on her soul he had
never really known when her body left off being lanky and freckled. He
saw it now, however; he would have been blind if he had not; and it
set him vibrating with the throb of a new responsibility. Mrs. Pearce
saw it too, and stared astonished at this oddly inappropriate niece.
She stared still more when Fritzing, jumping up from his chair, bent
over the hand Priscilla held out and kissed it with a devotion and
respect wholly absent from the manner of Mrs. Pearce's own uncles.
She, therefore, withdrew into her kitchen, and being a person of
little culture crudely expressed her wonder by thinking "Lor." To
which, after an interval of vague meanderings among saucepans, she
added the elucidation, "Foreigners."

Half an hour later Lady Shuttleworth's agent, Mr. Dawson, was
disturbed at his tea by the announcement that a gentleman wished to
speak to him. Mr. Dawson was a bluff person, and something of a
tyrant, for he reigned supreme in Symford after Lady Shuttleworth, and
to reign supreme over anybody, even over a handful of cottagers, does
bring out what a man may have in him of tyrant. Another circumstance
that brings this out is the possession of a meek wife; and Mr.
Dawson's wife was really so very meek that I fear when the Day of
Reckoning comes much of this tyranny will be forgiven him and laid to
her account. Mr. Dawson, in fact, represented an unending series of
pitfalls set along his wife's path by Fate, into every one of which
she fell; and since we are not supposed, on pain of punishment, to do
anything but keep very upright on our feet as we trudge along the
dusty road of life, no doubt all those amiable stumblings will be
imputed to her in the end for sin. "This man was handed over to you
quite nice and kind," one can imagine Justice saying in an awful
voice; "his intentions to start with were beyond reproach. Do you not
remember, on the eve of your wedding, how he swore with tears he would
be good to you? Look, now, what you have made of him. You have
prevented his being good to you by your own excessive goodness to
him. You have spent your time nourishi