And Theresa Bilson—­pleasing thought!—­was, for the moment, absent also, having gone to tea with the Miss Minetts.  Two maiden ladies, these, of uncertain age, modest fortune and unimpeachable refinement, once like Theresa herself, members of the scholastic profession; but now, thanks to the timely death of a relative—­with consequent annuities and life interest in a ten-roomed, stone-built house of rather mournful aspect in Deadham village—­able to rest from their ineffectual labours, support the Church, patronize their poorer and adulate their richer neighbours to their guileless hearts’ content.

Gentility exuded from the Miss Minetts, and—­if it is permissible slightly to labour the simile—­their pores were permanently open.  Owing both to her antecedent and existing situation, it may be added, Theresa Bilson was precious in their sight.  For had she not in the past, like themselves, sounded the many mortifications of a governess’ lot; and was she not now called up higher, promoted indeed to familiar, almost hourly, intercourse with the great?  Miss Felicia Verity was known to treat her with affection.  Mrs. Augustus Cowden, that true blue of county dames and local aristocrats, openly approved her.  She sat daily at Sir Charles Verity’s table and helped to order his household.  What more genuine patents of gentility could be asked?  So they listened with a pleasure, deep almost to agitation, to her performances upon the piano, her reminiscences of Bonn and the Rhine Provinces, and, above all, to her anecdotes of life at The Hard and of its distinguished owner’s habits and speech.  Thus, by operation of the fundamental irony resident in things, did Theresa Bilson, of all improbable and inadequate little people, become to the Miss Minetts as a messenger of the gods; exciting in them not only dim fluttering apprehensions of the glories of art and delights of foreign travel, but—­though in their determined gentility they knew it not—­of the primitive allurements and mysteries of sex.

The moral effect of this friendship upon Theresa herself was not, however, of the happiest.  Fired by their interest in her recitals she was tempted to spread herself.  At first almost unconsciously, for by instinct she was truthful, she embroidered fact, magnifying her office not only in respect of her ex-pupil Damaris but of Damaris’ father also.  She represented herself as indispensable to both parent and child, until she more than half believed that flattering fiction.  She began to reckon herself an essential element in the establishment at The Hard, the pivot indeed upon which it turned.  Whereupon a rather morbid craving for the Miss Minetts’ society developed in her.  For, with those two credulous ladies as audience, she could fortify herself in delusion by recounting all manner of episodes and incidents not as they actually had, but as she so ardently desired they might have, taken place.—­A pathetic form of lying this, though far from uncommon to feminine and—­more especially—­spinster practice and habit!