No sooner was she gone than the old gardener knocked at the door.
The foregoing conversation took place in the library of a small but comfortable country parsonage in one of the eastern counties, situated, with a southern aspect, on an eminence a little removed from the highroad which, emerging from a broad avenue of fine elms on the right of the parsonage, passed the bottom of its garden into the hamlet of Dulham on the left. The view from the library window on that fine June morning, the brighter for a night’s rain, extended over a wide range of flat grass land, bounded by gentle undulations in the distance; and the east breeze was bringing brine from the sea coast, distant about twenty miles.
The occupants of the room were the Reverend Spinosa Theodore Bristley, B.D., Vicar of Dulham, near Frogmore, Eastshire, a spare, tall, intellectual-looking man of about forty, with sharp features, a high open forehead, and thick glossy black hair; his widowed sister, Mrs Newman, and her daughter Lesbia. Mr Bristley had been married some years, but his wife had borne no children; she was a mild-mannered, amiable person, with no great natural gifts, and hardly as intelligent in conversation as might have been expected from one living with a man of her husband’s stamp. Her sister-in-law, Mrs Newman, was of a different style, but not enough so to prevent the two women agreeing upon the point of bitter opposition to the scheme upon which the vicar—a very original character—was bent, that of bringing up a girl to take her proper place in the world, untrammelled by the habits of studied littleness, fashion-serving, mischief-making, mean rivalry and general unsoundness, which society—at least, so said this eccentric parson—considers essentials of the perfect lady. Hence a chronic feud existed upon that one subject in the otherwise harmonious family, the girl being already old enough and quick enough to perceive that her female
