Fritzing was surprised to hear her say so, for his impressions had all been the other way.  As far as he, inexperienced man, could tell, Baker’s was a singularly draughty and unscrubbed place.  He smelt that its fires smoked, he heard that its windows rattled, he knew that its mattresses had lumps in them, and he saw that its food was inextricably mixed up with objects of a black and gritty nature.  But her calm face and sorrowful assurance shook the evidence of his senses, and gazing at her in silence over his spectacles a feeling crept dimly across his brain that if the future held many dealings with women like Mrs. Pearce he was going to be very helpless.

Priscilla appeared while he was gazing.  She was dressed for going out and came in buttoning her gloves, and I suppose it was a long time since Baker’s had seen anything quite so radiant in the way of nieces within its dusty walls.  She had on the clothes she had travelled in, for a search among the garments bought by Fritzing had resulted in nothing but a sitting on the side of the bed and laughing tears, so it was clearly not the clothes that made her seem all of a sparkle with lovely youth and blitheness.  Kunitz would 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,