Mrs. Gresley, who had a waist which the Southminster dress-maker informed her had “to be kept down,” made a mental note for the hundredth time that Hester “laced in.”

Hester gave that impression of “finish” and sharpness of edge so rarely found among the blurred, vague outlines of English women.  There was nothing vague about her.  Lord Newhaven said she had been cut out body and mind with a sharp pair of scissors.  Her irregular profile, her delicate, pointed speech and fingers, her manner of picking up her slender feet as she walked, her quick, alert movements—­everything about her was neat, adjusted, perfect in its way, yet without more apparent effort than the succes fou in black and white of the water wagtail, which she so closely resembled.

“Good-morning,” she said, turning back with them to the house.  “Abel says it is going to be the hottest day we have had yet.  And the letter-bag is so fat that I could hardly refrain from opening it.  Really, James, you ought to hide the key, or I shall succumb to temptation.”

Once in the days of her ignorance, when she first came to live at Warpington, Hester had actually turned the key in the lock of the sacred letter-bag when the Gresleys were both late, and had extracted her own letters.  She never did it a second time.  On the contrary, she begged pardon in real regret at having given such deep offence to her brother and his wife, and in astonishment that so simple an action could offend.  She had made an equally distressing blunder in the early days of her life with the Gresleys by taking up the daily paper on its arrival in the afternoon.

“My dear Hester,” Mrs. Gresley said, really scandalized, “I am sure you won’t mind my saying so, but James has not seen his paper yet.”

“I have noticed he never by any chance looks at it till the evening, and you always say you never read it,” said Hester, deep in a political crisis.

“That is his rule, and a very good rule it is; but he naturally likes to be the first to look at it,” said Mrs. Gresley, with a great exercise of patience.  She had heard Hester was clever, but she found her very stupid.  Everything had to be explained to her.

Her tone recalled Hester from the Indian tribal rising and the speech of the Prime Minister to the realities of life.  It was fortunate for her that she was quick-witted.  These two flagrant blunders were sufficient for her.  She grasped the principle that those who have a great love of power and little scope for it must necessarily exercise it in trivial matters.  She extended the principle of the newspaper and the letter-bag over her entire intercourse with the Gresleys and never offended in that manner again.

On this particular morning she waited decorously beside her brother as he opened the bag and dealt out the contents into three heaps.  Hester pounced on hers and subsided into her chair at the breakfast-table.