appearance. He had seldom seen her so much at fault for a criticism. Mrs. Douglas had never had the slightest pretensions to good looks; in fact, though it is wrong to say anything so ill-natured, she was excessively plain, always had been so, and had a soreness on the subject of beauty, that looked perhaps as like envy as any other quality.
As she had no hope of raising herself to the rank of a beauty, her only chance was bringing others down to her own level. "How old she is looking!"—"How she is altered!" were the expressions that invariably concluded Mrs. Douglas's comments on her acquaintances; and the prolonged absence of a friend was almost a pleasure to her, as it gave her the opportunity of saying after a first meeting, "How changed Mrs. So-and so is! I should hardly have known her; but then, to be sure, I have not seen her for a year—or two years," etc.
People may go on talking for ever of the jealousies of pretty women; but for real genuine, hard-working envy there is nothing like an ugly woman with a taste for admiration. Her mortified vanity curdles into malevolence; and she calumniates where she cannot rival.
Mrs. Douglas had been an heiress, which perhaps accounted for Mr. Douglas having married her; but though no one could suppose that he married for love, he had been to her what is called a good husband. He let her have a reasonable share of her own way, and spend a reasonable portion of her own money; he abstained from all vivid admiration of beauty within her hearing; he had a great reliance on her judgment, and a high opinion of her talents; and though he was too good-hearted to hear without pain her sarcasms on almost all her acquaintance, he seldom irritated her by contradiction, but kept his own opinion with a quiet regret that his wife was so hard to please.
The Eskdales and Douglases had been near neighbours
