“As I remarked when you told me you had asked her to marry you,” said Lady Maria on the occasion of his lunching with her on running up to town for a day’s business, “you showed a great deal more sense than most men of your age and rank.  If people will marry, they should choose the persons least likely to interfere with them.  Emily will never interfere with you.  She cares a great deal more about your pleasure than her own.  And as to that, she’s so much like a big, healthy, good child that she would find pleasure wheresoever you dropped her.”

This was true, yet the healthy, childish creature had, in deep privacy, cried a little, and was pathetically glad to feel that the Osborns were to be near her, and that she would have Hester to think of and take care of during the summer.

It was pathetic that she should cherish an affection so ingenuous for the Osborns, for one of them at least had no patience with her.  To Captain Osborn her existence and presence in the near neighbourhood were offences.  He told himself that she was of the particular type of woman he most disliked.  She was a big, blundering fool, he said, and her size and very good nature itself got on his nerves and irritated him.

“She looks so deucedly prosperous with her first-rate clothes and her bouncing health,” he said.

“The tread of her big feet makes me mad when I hear it.”

Hester answered with a shrill little laugh.

“Her big feet are a better shape than mine,” she said.  “I ought to hate her, and I would if I could, but I can’t.”

“I can,” muttered Osborn between his teeth as he turned to the mantel and scratched a match to light his pipe.

Chapter Twelve

When Lord Walderhurst took his departure for India, his wife began to order her daily existence as he had imagined she would.  Before he had left her she had appeared at the first Drawing-room, and had spent a few weeks at the town house, where they had given several imposing and serious dinner parties, more remarkable for dignity and good taste than liveliness.  The duties of social existence in town would have been unbearable for Emily without her husband.  Dressed by Jane Cupp with a passion of fervour, fine folds sweeping from her small, long waist, diamonds strung round her neck, and a tiara or a big star in her full brown hair, Emily was rather superb when supported by the consciousness that Walderhurst’s well-carried maturity and long accustomedness were near her.  With him she could enjoy even the unlively splendour of a function, but without him she would have been very unhappy.  At Palstrey she was ceasing to feel new, and had begun to realise that she belonged to the world she lived in.  She was becoming accustomed to her surroundings, and enjoyed them to the utmost.  Her easily roused affections were warmed by the patriarchal atmosphere of village life.  Most of the Palstrey villagers had touched their forelocks or curtsied to Walderhursts for generations.  Emily liked to remember this, and had at once conceived a fondness for the simple folk, who seemed somehow related so closely to the man she worshipped.