on as reverently as if it were a plate in
church, had never spoken a profane word or recognized a joke in his
life, and still dined at two o'clock in the afternoon because his
grandfather, who was dyspeptic by constitution, had been unable to
digest a late dinner. At the time of his marriage, an unusually happy
one, he was regarded as "the handsomest man of his day"; and he was
still yearned over from a distance by elderly ladies of suppressed
romantic temperaments.

Mrs. Culpeper, a small imperious woman of distinguished lineage and
uncertain temper, had gone through an entire life seeing only one thing
at a time, and never seeing that one thing as it really was. If her
husband embodied the moral purpose, she herself was an incarnation of
the evasive idealism of the nineteenth century. Her universe was
comprised in her family circle; her horizon ended with the old brick
wall between the alley and the Culpepers' garden. All that related to
her husband, her eight children and her six grandchildren, was not only
of supreme importance and intense interest to her, but of unsurpassed
beauty and excellence. It was intolerable to her exclusive maternal
instinct that either virtue or happiness should exist in any degree,
except a lesser measure, outside of her own household; and praise of
another woman's children conveyed to her a secret disparagement of her
own. Having naturally a kind heart she could forgive any sin in her
neighbours except prosperity--though as Corinna had once observed, with
characteristic flippancy, "Continual affliction was a high price to pay
for Aunt Harriet's favour." In her girlhood she had been a famous
beauty; and she was still as fine and delicately tinted as a carving in
old ivory, with a skin like a faded microphylla rose-leaf, and stiff
yellowish white hair, worn a la Pompadour. Her mind was thin but firm,
and having received a backward twist in its youth, it had remained
inflexibly bent for more than sixty years. Unlike her husband she was
gifted with an active, though perfectly concrete imagination--a kind of
superior magic lantern that shot out images in black and white on a
sheet--and a sense of humour which, in spite of the fact that it lost
its edge when it was pointed at the family, was not without practical
value in a crisis.

On the evening of Stephen's adventure in the Square, the Culpeper family
had gathered in the front drawing-room, to await the arrival of a young
cousin, whom, th