Unimaginative people, or those of limited vocabulary, affixed to Miss Coppinger the ancient label:  “A typical old maid,” and considered that no further definition was required; and, since her appearance conformed in some degree with stage traditions, there is something to be said for them.  If labels are to be employed, even the least complex of human beings would suggest a much-travelled portmanteau, covered with tags and shreds from hotels and railways.  Frederica shall not be labelled; let it suffice to say that she was tall and thin, and nearer fifty than forty (which was a far greater age thirty years ago than it is now), and that she had a sense of fair play that was proof against her zeal as an Irish Church-woman.  It is true that she mentioned what she regarded as the disaster of Larry’s religion in her prayers, but she did so without heat, leaving the matter, without irreverence, to the common sense of Larry’s Creator, who, she felt must surely recognise the disadvantages of the position as it stood.

“I cannot possibly interfere with Larry’s religion,” pursued Miss Coppinger, with a defiant eye on her cousin, “and as soon as we are a little more settled down I shall ask the priest to lunch.  Farther than that I don’t feel called upon to go.”

“Draw the line at dinner, eh?” said Major Dick, with large and humorous tolerance:  “I know very little about the feller—­he’s newly come to the parish—­he mayn’t be a bad sort for all I know—­I’m bound to say he’s got a black-muzzled look about him, but we might go farther and fare worse.  I should certainly have him to lunch if I were you.  Have a good big joint of roast beef, and don’t forget to give him his whack of whisky!”

“I never have whisky in the house,” said Miss Coppinger repressively.  “Claret, I could give him—?”

Major Talbot-Lowry looked down at his cousin with the condescending amusement that he felt to be the meed of female godliness especially when allied with temperance principles.

“Well, claret might do for once in a way,” he conceded, shaking his long legs to take the creases out of his trousers, “and you mightn’t find Father Sweeny so anxious to repeat the dose—­and that mightn’t be any harm either!  I daresay you wouldn’t object to that, Frederica!  Well, good-bye, ladies!  I’m going down to the kennels—­”

Lady Isabel’s and Miss Coppinger’s eyes followed him, as he swung, with that light halt in his leisurely stride, down the long drawing-room, trolling in the high baritone, that someone had pleased him by likening to a cavalry trumpet,

  “Oh, Father McCann was a beautiful man,
    But a bit of a rogue, a bit of a rogue! 
  He was full six feet high, he’d a cast in his eye,
    And an illigant brogue, an illigant brogue!”

In both his wife’s and his cousin’s faces was the same look, the look that often comes into women’s faces when, unperceived, they regard the sovereign creature.  Future generations may not know that look, but in the faces of these women, born in the earlier half of the nineteenth century, there was something of awe, and of indulgence, of apprehension, and of pity.  Dick was so powerful, so blundering, so childlike.  Miss Frederica expressed something of their common thought when she said: